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

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.

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: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.