Teaching Engineers to Write?

$hecky asks: "I teach several sections of a first-year writing course at a small, private college where most of the students are, or plan to be, some flavor of engineer. Right now, I'm planning next year's courses and wondering what has (and hasn't) helped Slashdot readers become better writers. Also, I'm wondering which writing skills you, in your roles as workers and teachers, would most like to see emphasized in first year writing courses. Put another way, where do you see people who have completed first-year writing courses screwing up their writing, and which experiences, practices, and pressures you think have made you a better writer?" "First, let's head a couple wagons off at the pass. Let's avoid the vulgar confusion of good writing and good grammar. Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class. About a century of research tells us that native English speakers aren't rule-based parsers, so teaching grammatical rules (like when to use the subjunctive or where to put commas) doesn't improve compliance. The best strategy on those fronts is a habitual reading of clearly-formatted texts and scrupulous multi-stage review of everything you write, both of which are somewhat outside the scope of a semester-long class.

Second, let's say that the chief virtue of good writing is clarity. While some kinds of writing prize being strategically elliptical, and others prize brisk and clever metaphor, most of my students aren't writing grant applications, patents, or poems. So metaphor, however brisk or clever, is out of place if it obscures its subject.

Third, this course is a cultural studies type, rather than a workshop. This means that the course has a topic of inquiry about which all of the students read and write for a semester and that, while being reasonably complex, the topic should accommodate students who are going to become accountants, math teachers, and advertisers. It's common for engineering students to wash out into the business school, and there's a significant contingent of humanities students as well. Anything other than a general interest topic (like the 1960s, ideas about the American West, or fairy tales) isn't an option.

So think back to your writing. What has made you more comfortable with your writing, or eager to improve what you've written? What inspires you to read outside of a classroom or mandated context? Was has impressed on you the importance of revision, or at least of reviewing your writing at intervals? Which parts of which college (or high school) curricula have helped you write better? Finally, which aspects of your students' or co-workers' writing do you find most troublesome?"

Comments

A Grammar system helps

[OrangeTide]

The 5 column system tends to work well for Engineers since it presents some of the trickest parts of English in a logical way.

http://www.lbt-languages.de/english/lernhilfe/lern hilfe.html

Re:A Grammar system helps

[critical_v]

as a (former, hopefully future) writing instructor, i've got to say that grammar is just about the least important part of writing. most grammar instruction (AKA prescribed grammar) actually does more harm than good, because people replace the unspoken grammar instruction that they learned from their family and friends with incorrect and confused uses of prescribed grammar. what *does* work for engineering students (and most other students) is to instruct them on organization. organization separates formal writing from informal writing, and generally, in a writing class, formal writing is taught. this is informal, so i didn't use caps, and i didn't writing a second draft with consideration for better organization.

Re:A Grammar system helps

[CodeBuster]

generally, in a writing class, formal writing is taught.

It is interesting to hear you say this because I recall from my freshman writing courses that the subject matter was almost always informal or, to put it another way, not related in either style or substance to the more formalized writing that one uses in the business or technical environment excluding email with programming being the most formal writing of all. I was fortunate in that my writing skills were not as poor as those of my peers coming out of high school, but I must confess that I was often completely disinterested in the materials that were presented as a normal part of the required coursework. The writing topics struck me as being out of touch with the life experience of the average student and motivated by a sickening undercurrent of political correctness that smacked of liberal intellectual philosophy. If the goal is to teach students to improve their writing skills then it would be nice to have a couple of topic choices for each assignment so that the subject matter does not interfere with the primary objective. The basic problem in most college writing courses is that engineers, while highly intelligent and motivated, tend to favor the systematic and logical approach to problem solving at the expense of the creative and human reasoning solution. Some might say that this also explains why there are few attractive women in most engineering schools and why engineers can write software, modify complex machinery, and solve differential equations, but are unable to hold a non-professional conversation with an attractive female or male (although true female nerds are rare indeed). If you want to reach the engineers in your class then you will have to emphasize the grammar, sentence structure, and organization rules at the risk of possibly loosing the non-engineering students. Remember that engineers revel in logically complex rule-based systems and are generally very good abstract thinkers so what would normally fail for a non-engineering student, emphasis on grammar and rules, is precisely the approach that engineers understand and appreciate. The trick will be to strike the correct balance so that the engineers do not simply check out when they are in your writing class. Unfortunately, many college writing courses, and mine were no exception, are stacked against the engineering students because the people that teach them, for the most part, do not understand how best to teach engineers.

Left Brain, Right Brain

[RonBurk]

The #1 thing I would make sure I taught engineers is to separate writing from editing. The most common "I hate to write" problem I find in fellow engineers is that no one ever taught them to do the work in (at least) two phases.

First, do the writing: get all your ideas down as fast as you can without worrying about structure, or complete sentences or anything except putting everything down that you can think of.

Second, do the editing. Now look at your big pile of ideas and think about what the right order for things is, how to start and finish it, what to throw out, what things go best together, and eventually even sentence-level details like grammar.

8 times out of 10 when I have an engineer staring at two sentences on an otherwise blank screen, it's because they think it has to spool out onto the page in linear, perfected form right from the start.

Invest the time

[SeeMyNuts!]

My best teacher by far was my freshmen English professor. One thing he did was meet with us one-at-a-time for every paper we wrote. He'd make us read our papers aloud, and he'd point out ways to re-order paragraphs, remove unneeded words, etc. He had taught for something like 50 years, and he knew every mistake we would make and how to explain why it was a mistake.

Re:Invest the time

[Haszak]

I had a similar experience. The teacher that turned me on to writing was an instructor I had in colloge. He'd ask everyone to pick their best sentence from that week's assignment. He'd ask us to write it on the board, then he and the class would tear it apart and completely rewrite it. It really got us thinking about what and how we were writing. Do we need this word/phrase? What word/phrase would be stronger here? etc. And I'm still learning the lesson of writing to your audience. It's not "writing" to them, it's "understanding" them that's difficult. Especially for engineers writing about subjects they're familiar with and that their audience (unbeknownst to them) could never understand it in the way they do. I think journalism is a good teacher here. Put the who/what/where/when/why in the first few sentances. It doesn't matter who you are or what you're reading, there's a chance you're going to skim. Best to write for skimmers. I've started writing even small subsections with little bolded titles to catch those who are going to spend five seconds in that area. (It also helps people find what they're looking for.) And I even make seperate versions of the same explanation with titles like "one sentence", "one paragraph", "half page" to describe how detailed I'm getting. After all, especially in technology, you'll never know the abilities, understanding, or interest of those who pick up your documents.

Ideas flow better when I write well to start with

[KWTm]

Not to be contrarian, but I'd like to present a different viewpoint. I have never subscribed to this "just put your ideas down now; worry about the grammar later" school of thought. Such a process makes a chore of having to go back and correct the ideas to make them presentable, as if grammar and other finer points of writing were unnecessary burdens imposed by the teacher and other excessively picky individuals. For me, putting my ideas on paper (or on screen) in a presentable way from the very start makes my ideas flow better because I am channelling them into a form that is understandable by others and hence by myself. In short, it helps me think.

Now, I admit that perhaps this way isn't for everybody. It just so happens that I've got a pretty good mastery of grammar, spelling, etc. --I won't claim that it's perfect, but it doesn't pose any extra burden for me to do it right. On the other hand, maybe it's because of this very demand for doing it right that has made it second nature to me. If the students don't have this habit ingrained yet, one semester won't be enough to change that; but I'd hate for anyone to aim for a "correct it later" attitude as the norm in writing.

You could compare it to programming. What are your first steps when you sit down to write a program? Yes, yes, of course there are doodles, sketches and diagrams. But when you get down to coding, I hope that you don't just code any old program and then go back later to fix compilation errors. I hope that you'll make sure it's clean, well-structured code that makes it easy to improve (as opposed to "correct") later.

Re:Writing is just a tool...like any other....

[Martin Blank]

The best advice that ever provided to me for writing consisted of avoiding, as much as possible, all use of the word 'be' and its variants. Doing so forces the writer to utilize more interesting words and vary the sentence structure, which helps to keep the reader's attention. The following list contains all of the words to avoid:

am
are
is
was
were
be
being
been

While not sorted alphabetically, my teacher at the time provided them in that order, so my recital follows the same.

How I Helped My Roommate

[KU_Fletch]

In college, I was an English major and my roommate was an Electrical Engineering major (wacky hijinx ensued). Around junior and sneior year he began to take the remaining humanities courses he needed, and was now faced with having to write reports and other assignments. Like a lot of engineers, he wasn't that great at it. He had the basic functions of grammar, but he had no form. Getting him to break out of simple sentences and direct lines of logic took a while, but I tried my best to help him (and in return he paid for the beer). Here were some of the things I found helpful:

1) Getting him to say things outloud first. If it was supposed to be a persuasive paper or some sort of analysis, I had him explain his argument to me outloud. This gave him an opportunity to explain his thoughts in complex sentences and think out everything he wanted to put donw on paper. Once, I even recorded it for him and made him listen to it before he wrote. This really helped his transition from thinking to writing without that pesky engineering filter killing his points.

2) Writing for fun. Since I was taking numerous writing classes where I had to keep journals, I got him to start his own journal. I told him it could be anything he wanted, as long as he tried to write different things in it. In the end he started to write small poems, short stories, and a diary in the same spiral. More than anything, this got him used to writing in different form while still keeping his voice. It also made him into a faster writer.

3) Red ink is painful, but needed. I loved my roommate like a brother, but I was more than willing to slam red ink all over his rough drafts. The problem with showing your rough drafts to peers in classes is that people fear reciprocation. If you say something negative, people might do the same to yours. So you get a lot of cursory comma markers and spelling errors, but nothing of real value. So I'd go through his and find everything I could think of that was possibly wrong. Jumps in logic. Grammar errors. Splitting paragraphs. Suggesting where sentences could be deleted or rearranged. At first he didn't like it, but he certainly went back and gave his papers a hard edit. After a few papers, I could just read it over and give him those same comments face to face while avoiding the little errors he already started to fix on his own. In a classroom setting, consider doing peer revisions anonymously, and explain that editing means more than comma splices.

Those things really seemed to help him get out of his shell. To this day I don't think that Engineers are bad writers, they just have this wierd filter installed in their heads that won't let a lot of them write down what they're thinking about. They can explain it to you outloud, but not write down those same words on paper. Getting them past that hurdle is the best thing you can do.

Practice, Practice, Practice

[Llywelyn]

There are two events in college that helped me more with writing than anything else. I attended an engineering university, and continued with scientific/engineering coursework after graduation.

The first was an honors class that required me to write a paper ever week. The catch? It had to be under two pages. These papers covered a variety of reading material--short stories, essays, and books. I had to find something in the reading material to write about, and write two pages on it. This helped me an enormous amount--it gave me constant feedback on my writing, helped me be clear, concise, and precise, and it enabled me to write a two page paper with these characteristics very quickly.

The second event happened in a class called, strangely enough, "Technical Writing." After I turned in one paper the professor handed it back to me and said "take this back and write it again in English. All of your sentences are inversions--70% of them should be Subject, Verb, Object."

The biggest thing through all of it was practice, practice, practice with constant feedback.

Persuasive / Argumentative Writing

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not learn how to write well in high school, nor did I learn in college. Now that I am in law school, I can at least see the flaws in my writing even though I may not know how to make it better. Before law school, the great majority of my previous writing experience is of a technical / descriptive nature, where my goal is to describe something, whether it be a book, a project, an experiment.

The difference with writing for law school is that I'm writing to win an argument, and I know there is someone on the other side trying to be more persuasive. As an engineer, you believe you win arguments by presenting the facts and analysis, not really by being persuasive. The change from engineer to law student means I see a different objective in everything I write. Instead of just trying to include all the relevant facts, in whatever haphazard manner, I see my writing as trying to convince the reader. This means that concious of various elemts of style -- such as sentence structure, word choice, paragraph structure, transitions, and flow of the entire paper -- in writing my papers.

The other change is in how I read other people's writing. I started to notice particularly well phrased passages that could convey a certain feeling or argument in a powerful way, and I would try to see how I would the same. Invariably, my efforts pale in comparison, but this gives me the opportunity to compare and see how I can improve.

Therefore, I suggest having writing assignments that are more than just descriptive, such as a book report or a summarization, but rather pit students against each other in writing from different points of view. Make them read each other's paper and critique what was good, what was weak, and who's paper prevailed.

Cheers.

Re:Suggestions...

[belmolis]

No! No! A thousand times no! The Elements of Style is awful. It purveys ignorant advice that no good writer would follow. For an idea of how awful it is, see this discussion by linguist Geoff Pullum.

Re:Suggestions...

[AhtirTano]

First, get every student a copy of "The Elements of Style". It's a very small book originally written around WWI. It points out the most frequent mistakes in writing. It's an excellent book, following the tips within will make anyone a better writer.

I'll probably be the lone voice of dissent on this point. I hate this book. I am a linguist, which means I'm a pedantic grammarian. The Elements of Style is simply wrong on most grammatical advice it gives, and is frequently misguided about stylistic advice. Almost none of the great works of literature follow their rules: Shakespeare, Conrad, Twain, Poe, Hawthorne, Elliot--even the US Constitution and Declaration of Independence are faulty by the standards of that book! Even they don't follow their own advice! The sooner this book stops being pushed on students, the better.

Don't just take my word for it. Here's the opinion of one of the authors of one of the most complete and accurate grammars of the English Language ever written:

[Elements of Style is] a horrid little compendium of unmotivated prejudices (don't use ongoing), arbitrary stipulations (don't begin a sentence with however), and fatuous advice ("Be clear"), ridiculously out of date in its positions on appropriate choices among grammatical variants, deeply suspect in its style advice and grotesquely wrong in most of the grammatical advice it gives.

Engineers and English

[Anonymous Coward]

As a Chemistry grad who's had to do QA on documents produced by Engineers, Physicists and CS grads I'd say (in order of seriousness)

    1 - The blank paper syndrome

    2 - excessively long sentences (but hard and fast rules are difficult to define)

    3 - excessively reflexive structures (at sentence, paragraph and section level)

    4 - use of jargon without explaination (especially when the doc is aimed at non-tech staff)

    5 - bad spelling, e.g stationary instead of stationery, dependant instead of dependent

    6 - inventing new words for no obvious reason

Re:Suggestions...

[rolfwind]

I read this book, and past the first few chapters, thought it was a boring and pendantic excursion into the proper grammar world. I said it before in this very thread, but I'll repeat it because it is such a good book:

Get "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.

Here are the most worthwhile chapters:
http://www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/general/sourc es/zinsser.htm [wayne.edu]

The rest of the book is okay, but these three chapters are simply inspired.

Re:Suggestions...

[AbsoluteKeenan]

There are two books that have served me well. The Art of Nonfiction is the best. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0452282314/qid=11 47010363/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/104-6558899-4510320?s=b ooks&v=glance&n=283155/

Writing and Thinking is also an excellent book. It has a wonderful introduction to the chapter on spelling which you would never see in a modern text. Basically, it stresses the importance of spelling correctly, otherwise you look ignorant and you lose the reader's confidence that you know what you are talking about. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1889439150/ref=no sim/104-6558899-4510320?n=283155/

Remember: Say what you mean, and mean what you say.

A linguist may not have a relevant opinion

[supercrisp]

Hey, I work in the US's oldest writing center, and I've taught writing since 1991. Strunk & White is useful because it is a key into the world of proscriptive grammar. We can talk about descriptive grammars, fluency, natural methods of language acquisition all we want--I myself am an avant-garde poet committed to process and organicism--but IF YOU DO NOT KNOW THE RULES OF PROSCRIPTIVE GRAMMAR YOU WILL STILL BE JUDGED BY THEM NO MATTER WHAT LINGUISTS AND POETS THINK. My students who are no nonnative speakers find S&W useful because it begins to give them advice about STYLE. No discussion on slashdot is worthwhile, or seems really meant to be so, but if this conversation were to be worthwhile, we'd do well to distinguish carefully between writing process, correctness, and style. Writing is a complicated business, but with all due respect, a linguist offering advice on writing is like letting a primatologist pick your wedding dress-- far too many levels of abstraction away from the real practice. Oh, some of my best friends are linguists, so this isn't some anti-linguist bias.