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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?"
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?"
wuldn't it be ironik if no1 respondid?
The 5 column system tends to work well for Engineers since it presents some of the trickest parts of English in a logical way.
n hilfe.html
http://www.lbt-languages.de/english/lernhilfe/ler
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
This is Slashdot, where grammar, punctuation, and subject verb agreement long ago came to die.
I think my biggest problem as a writer has been just learning to get over myself. Adding chiasmus and clever literary trope seems clever to me at the time, but doesn't really do anything for whoever is reading my stuff.
Another weird habit I have is writing everything as if it were going to be read out loud. This makes many of my sentences unreasonably short. Which is good, when read it my voice. But most people on the web don't read in my voice.
(you can see what I'm talking about if you check out the newer writing on my website)
Also, less is more. I repeated myself in the post. Writing sober also seems to help.
-- Fugacity: Confusing chemists since 1908
The type of writing that garners the most interest from young minds is creative writing rather than the more mundane technical or analytical types. These are engineers. They need to be able to abstract and yet be "technically" correct.
Writing assignments that start with a foundation, akin to how Sean Connery's character in Finding Forrester helped his apprentice stir his creative juices, can be really effective. I remember quite clearly an English teacher I had in eighth grade that would give us assignments like that. He would start us off with a paragraph setting a scene or introducing a character and we would have to take the story forward from there. Obviously, there are some additional parameters that you as the instructor can wrap around the assignment, but the concept is something that works well for a mixed audience of students.
Just a suggestion.
As a person with a degree in Electrical Engineering, who then went to grad school for secondary ed physics and math, I found that the classes that helped my writing the most were those classes that a lot of people dread, the gen-ed classes. I found that my Pscychology, the grad level Education classes, and anthropology type classes really improved my writing. The reason is that I was made to work outside of my comfort level of math and physics, and actually do reasearch, put coherent thoughts together, and think about what I was writing. I never had much of a problem with clarity in my writings, and personally I prefer to write things for clarity. However, in the business world, presenting ideas with "elegance and grace" and a good pitch will often get your proposal more consideration than just pure clarity. Final reccomendation, make them learn to use more colorful word choices, and write on things that they may be interested in, but do not have any great knowledge of.
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.
Second, teach people to write to their audience. Far too often I see engineers write a recomendation to a customer that points out technical merits or problems, but doesn't frame those issues with reguard to the customer's business. A COO probably doesn't care about the problems with an ACL entry in a VPN setup. They do care if their employees can't work while on the road.
Third, while you might not be able to help people with their grammar or spelling, make sure they understand that those things do matter and need to be fixed. One of my co-workers is Jeopardy smart, but his writing is awful. If you were to judge him by his writing you'd think he was a complete idiot. Proofreading is sometimes more important that the initial writing. Students who have severe grammar problems should read their work out loud to themselves. That will help a LOT.
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.
Those are both active. I'm pretty sure you meant to write something like this:
Passive: The bike is ridden by the boy to the store.
-Dave
Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class.
it's
About what am I to write? For conveying technical information accurately and succinctly, I would use K&R's C book as a guide. For scorching hot lesbian erotica, I emulate Elizabeth Oliver's "Pagan Dreams." To date, both approaches work, but only on the appropriate topics.
Lemon curry?
What you are illustrating is present tense vs. present participle.
:)
Here is an illustration of active vs. passive voice:
Active: The boy rides his bike to the shore.
Passive: The bike is ridden to the shore by the boy.
You are correct in saying that active voice is the more direct and succinct of the two voices, and that technical writers should prefer it over passive voice. But it helps if your example illustrates the correct principle.
(Here comes the grammar nazi moddage...)
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
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.
Passive: The boy *is riding* his bike to the store.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.
Oh dear. I agree that using the active voice, rather than the passive, is almost always desirable. But your example doesn't use the passive voice. "The boy is riding ..." uses the progressive form rather than the simple present tense, but it's still the active voice. The passive construction would be something like, "The bicycle is being ridden by the boy to the store." (This, incidentally, shows how the passive voice can be clumsy.)
The passive voice is most objectionable [IMHO] when it is used, in effect, to dodge responsibility for one's statements: "Mistakes were made," or "It was decided that ..." It does, however, have good uses. "The injured man was taken away by ambulance" is an excellent use of the passive voice.
See The Elements of Style by W. Strunk and E.B. White for excellent guidance on this and many other topics.
Present writing as an engineering problem. This is an accurate, if somewhat unconventional, way to look at it. When you write, you have a goal (communicate a certain set of ideas), some constraints (target length, assumed audience, etc.) and some criteria for ranking proposed solutions (shorter is better, linking ideas in multiple ways gives a more robust treatment, etc.)
This fits neatly into the mold of classic engineering problems. Presented this way, they should be able to (with only a little guidance) bring their full skill set to bear on the problem. For example:
One of the biggest problems with teaching people to write is getting them to read what they have written, think about it, and rewrite it until it does what they wanted it to. Here, at least, engineers should have a head start over most students, insofar as they are used to the fact that your first stab at a design is almost never viable.
--MarkusQ
I've spent my life consuming vast amounts of text, and I feel that above all else, reading anything that's well-written has a positive effect on my writing skills. All the teaching I've had over the years had a miniscule effect on my writing compared to decades of reading major newspapers, news magazines, and a very long list of books. If you want to teach engineers a lot about reading, get them subscriptions to The New York Times, The Economist, The New Yorker, New York Monthly, US News and World Report, and other such well-written periodicals. They'll pick up a lot of good things from reading that stuff - far more than they will from reading technical publications.
You might also consider sending them to classes that involve a lot of reading, critical thinking about the reading, and writing about said readings and thoughts. Classes in subjects like ethics and art history can force one to think and write in very different ways from what one is used to.
Look, there's no need to get fancy - in my experience you will make a massive improvement in most (young) people's writing today just by teaching them how to use apostrophes and the difference between words like 'there' and 'their'. Mixing up 'than' and 'then' also seems to be something Americans, in particular, do a *lot* (something to do with accent, maybe ?). Speaking of which, telling people "words" like 'alot' aren't really words would also be a handy thing to do.
The state of English teaching today is atrocious, with many *teachers* not really knowing fundamental rules like when to use apostrophes, etc. Modern teaching philosophies like "as long as the message is communicated" and "it doesn't matter if you make mistakes, as long as your attempt is reasonable", combined with the steady downturn in reading (of "good" writing) and the increasing number of children (and many young adults) who are (/were) brought up with the TV as a babysitter are the prime culprits IMHO. The increasing pervasiveness of IMing and SMSing are only going to exacerbate an already bad situation. We've reached the point where even remotely correct English is unusual to see outside of carefully proofread professional documents and I, personally, am at the point now where I notice it more if someone spells "you're" _correctly_, rather than it's ubiquitous erroneous substitute, "your" (particularly on the web) .
The best way for people to improve their writing is to read, read, read. Not web pages and blogs (which are likely riddled with errors - particularly if they're written by, or targeted at, younger people - and just create a feedback loop of bad habits) but professionally published books and journals. Steer clear of low-end/populist magazines and tabloid-style newspapers, as well, as they are likely employing youger writers who will be making the same mistakes I'm talking about above - even if they *have* a degree of some sort.
The kind of attitudes you need to instil in your students are "close enough is *not* good enough", "just getting the message across os *not* sufficient" and "written language has rules, just like engineering, that should be followed to remove the possibility of ambiguity".
I have no doubt that I have also made technical mistakes just writing this, however, my point is that the level of basic spelling and grammar is so poor these days, that you don't need to be teaching complicated grammatical constructs to improve people's writing, you just need to be teaching the basics.
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.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
1. I second the active voice! Related: favor strong verbs (over preferential expression for nouns)
2. be brief,
3. and direct: assume the reader reads only the summary
4. and intellectually neutral: cast what you hope for as a theory, and acknowledge the opinions of others likewise.
In the end, good writing reflects good thinking. (But avoid cliches like the plague.)
A nitpick: since this article is about technical writing, isn't getting the facts straight (the boy is going to the *store*, not the shore, in the poster's example) more important than whether active or passive voice is used?
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.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
The idea that someone might actually read it, and not just inside of a classroom context. I am one of those people who has trouble learning or producing something unless I am either interested in the topic or someone else is going to use it.
When I was in my technicaly writing class in college we had to write instructions on how to do something (I chose the installation of a Half-Life Dedicated Server). The paper was given to five students. Every student was 20% of your grade; If they were unable to accomplish the end result because of a problem with your paper, you didn't get the 20% for the student.
Even the Business major in the class was able to do it with my instructions. THAT is an accomplishment!
Another thing that helped me become interested in writing a good paper is being interested about the subject - which usually meant that I had to choose the subject. Sorry, but writing about the complex social commentary buried in some obscure novel from the 1930s just doesn't get my rocks off. I couldn't care less. Those were my worst papers.
Simply enjoying doing so. Some people like to read; others do not. I'm not sure that there is anything you can do about this. You can't force someone to enjoy an activity. Personally, I read to get away from the 'real' world or to learn about something I enjoy. Most of my reading is fantasy, about animals, or about brewing.
We write to convey ideas. If my target audience can't understand that idea then my time and their time has been wasted.
Also, as mentioned above, if I care about what I'm writing I am much more likley to spend time on revision.
If my work is going to be seen by other people then I will give it more effort. Noone likes to be embarressed. This is, of course, a problem with students who are shy. Shy students may spend less time writing and revising because they don't want anyone to see what they've done, so they will do nothing at all.
Seeing examples of bad writing can make damn sure that I don't make the same mistake. I remember reading one of the Shanara books by Terry Brooks. One of his paragraphs had six sentences, all of them starting with the word 'He'. It wasn't done to create emphasis as far as I could tell; it was just damn annoying and it disrupted my flow of reading. The editor must have been on crack to miss that. Ever since then I've been extremely aware of writing just TWO sentences in a row that start with the same word. It just bugs me now!
The courses where I read a lot of different styles of writing. I seem to learn well when given different ideas to compare, and then pick and choose the parts I like the best.
Also, I took a creative writing class in high school the was helpful; Every day we were given a subject (though broad, and it was more a suggestion than anything else) and a particular style or form to try, or certain rules. No words with more than three syllables. End every paragraph with the same sentence. Write for a 5 year old. Write for a 30 year old. Write the same story, but from different perspectives, each with a different cultural background. Write a story that goes backwards through time. etc.
Something that can be helpful for creativity is to choose a topic, say, "rings", and just write a sentence or two (or a paragraph, whatever) about what you COULD write about. Just write down ideas. For rings, I could write down:
1) A story about a wedding, where there is a focus on the symbolism of wedding rings. Obvious, boring, but it's sti
Love sees no species.
There are two books that help endlessly in your life as a technical person:
For everything but formal texts, you need you use the book (I think every Highschool Student should get a copy for free):
Style: Towards Clarity and Grace, by Joseph M. Williams
For Formal Articles, Books, Papers, etc, you need you use this book:
Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas
The first book teaches you how to write in a plain, eminently understandable style. It underscores how to structure writing, sentences, and even individual phrases to clearly get across the points you wish to communicate. It eschews proscriptive rules like certain other writing books do *cough* Strunk and White *cough* that get too much attention.
The second book explains how to write in what is called classical style. This is a style of writing that you'll come across in documents such as the american Declaration of Independence, all of Descartes writing, and most of the writing of the Enlightenment. It is highly adaptable, and very comprehensible to anyone. Many popsci books go towards this style of writing, including some of Hawkings work, and most of Bronowski's. Classical style is more sophisticated than the plain style advocated in Williams, but some ideas are important enough to pay the cost of nuance at the expense of conscision.
--Michael
Want to see every step I took to start my company? http://www.rowdylabs.com/blogs/pitchtothegods
And possibly illegal.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I used to get A's in all my high school English classes, no problem. So nothing really impressed the importance of revision on me until I took freshman writing at college. What the instructor did was have us write 5 or 6 essays throughout the semester. Then, our last (and biggest) grade was just a rewrite of one of our other papers. It was graded on improvement from the first draft, not overall quality. Then he had a conference with everyone in the class to discuss with them why their paper was better the second time. It worked quite well, too. The importance of revision was definitely the best lesson I took out of that course.
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.
It's not stupid. It's advanced.
"Those are both active. I'm pretty sure you meant to write something like this:
Passive: The bike is ridden by the boy to the store."
Actually, "is riding" creates a nominative sentence--not active. It describes the boy as having a state of being: "riding." The word "riding" is a verbal noun (gerund), which is also used as an adjective. So "Subject (helping verb) adjective" - nominative. The sentence is not active at all, but passive.
Also, the best way to avoid the "it's" and "its" issues is advice I received from a professor: never write a sentence requiring either. A sentence is less ambiguous when the sentence does not contain the word "it," although takes a bit of effort. He dropped a paper's grade by one letter if he saw the word "it" used anywhere in a final draft. Back then, I just took "it" out of the spell checker. Besides, one typically does not apply a contraction (e.g. it's) in formal writing.
What those who want activist courts fear is rule by the people.
Bartleby offers a free electronic (HTML) version of "Elements of Style".
On the same site, they offer a few more classic texts and reference books on English Usage, Style & Composition. I find their collection of electronic references very useful, because it includes a "search" function, which by default searches through the entire collection. Very handy for looking up grammar rules or proper word usage.
I consider myself a good writer and I would take that active/passive simplistic preference with a huge grain of salt. There are many instances in which the object which is acted upon is more important than the actor in a particular context and thus for clarity's sake deserves to be mentioned first. For example:
The White House was almost burned down by British commandos in the war of 1812.
If I were to start out with "In the war of 1812, British commandos almost burned down..." then you would have no idea of the significance of the sentence until the very end.
Check out my women's designer clothing store.
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.
Integrate Keynote and LaTeX
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.
US Democracy:The best person for the job (among These pre-selected choices...)
u need to tellk them to practicr complainiing in teh internet it wurked for me!!!!+++++
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
(Yes! Now the engineers get to play with grammatical analysis tools and run them on their documents, which was a really cool thing back in the just-after-punchcards days
Some engineers are really good at grammar and spelling, and consider computer languages to be fundamentally the same processes of clear and beautiful thought as human languages. Others handle them as entirely different things - can't spell worth beenz and don't grammar thier English, even though they spend all day producing flawless syntax in artificial languages. Those of us in the former group don't really understand the latter, and find their behaviour annoying, but it's such a common pattern that it's obviously a different set of mental structures approaches to information processing or something, on the level of spoken-vs-written-vs-visual focus, as opposed to laziness and stupidity (:-) (Though the folks who don't find grammar and spelling natural should really use spell-checkers...) And I'm not ragging on non-native English speakers here - it's extremely common in native speakers, while the non-native speakers I've worked with often learned formal English grammar in school and don't use many of the more subtle verb forms of colloquial speech, though they do often have problems with spelling.
But as the original article says, grammar and spelling are much different issues than organization of content. There's a real value in teaching engineers how to write.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Before I begin with my opinion on this particular subject matter, I'd like to make it known that I am an Electrical Engineering, and Professional and Technical Writing double major. Take that for whatever it's worth. It doesn't mean this post will be entirely grammatically correct, mostly because I happen to not be an anal engineer.
First of all, since this class is dominated by engineering students, I recomend that there be at least a couple of weeks worth of instruction on how to properly write a lab paper. This is the form of document most engineers will find themselves writing throughout their lives, and most students have no idea how to do it. The first thing that must be instilled upon an engineering student is to unlearn all those pretty grammatical strategies that serve to lengthen documents. Subject redundancies, multiple titles for the same object, and the preperatory phrases. (i.e. "First of all") In addition to the instruction on how to be concise a professor should instruct students on how to properly use passive voice. In a lab report, the use of I, me, we, etc... should be strictly forbidden, thus passive voice becomes the most useful way to convey action while keeping the focus on the subject, not on who is doing it. The main problem with passive voice is that it tends to become convoluted and confusing if misused. Thus instruction is necessary. Placement of graphs, and order of topics should also be covered.
Beyond the instruction of lab writing, students should learn how to write towards an audience. A lot of this topic will run counter to what I said about lab reports, so be sure to let students know that labs are an animal all their own and etiquette in lab reports should be largely ignored in most other documents. Writing to an audience is crucial to a budding engineer, especially those engineers who lack certain social graces. Is the reader going to be a boss? A consumer? The marketing department? Fellow engineers? An engineer needs to learn how to adress each of these people, and learn how to be best understood. Intruction should be given on how to properly set up a traditional letter, how to properly use grammar in an e-mail, and how to dumb down the technical jargon of instructions so that they can be disseminated to the masses. Have students practice writing several types of document. It is my belief that a writing course should be taught with a generous helping of in and out of class writing assignments, to galvanize the concepts taught in lectures.
Teach resume writing... Good god most people, angineers and otherwise, can't write a resume to save their life...
Motivation. Most engineers can't write. It's a fact, and given the intelligence and capabilities of most engineers, a rather sad fact. Now the easiest motivation to use is by intilling the fact that engineers that can write get paid more. The average boost in paycheck for an engineer with an english or tech writing minor is $5000 a year. Not so bad for an extra 4 or 5 courses. It will also help in job hunting after leaving college. Engineers who can write, and deal well with people are rarities that are gobbled up by companies in a hurry. It gives them a competitive edge, and minimizes the need for additional employees just to act as liason between the engineers and the marketing/administration department.
I have yet to find a way to make myself, nevermind anyone else, review and revise my work. Good luck with that.
I'd be a little more helpful in general but I'm writing this at 4:30AM and I think I want to sleep. If the OP or anyone else has any question on style or grammer in their technical writing feel free to shoot me an e-mail. Most of my work is in grant proposals and an upcoming instruction manual for engineering programs and professors on incorporating team building and tech writing into first and second year college engineering curriculum.(Written in conjuction with The Birch Group, LLC.)
Please, try not to sound so stupid...
I'm not an engineer, but I am a pretty good writer. I attribute it to reading. Since I was a little kid, I've always read for pleasure. I don't think it matters too much what you read, as long as the sentences are well-constructed. Which is virtually every author. Most sci-fi authors can't write worth a damn, but their fundamentals are fine. People don't learn language so much as acquire it (I'm a linguistics major), and so something like reading which is semi-passive (you're not paying attention to the words and structures - just the plots) is perfect for absorbing good writing skills.
The best writing style to avoid active or passive sentences remains E-prime. Just prohibit the use of the verb 'to-be' and your message comes out a lot clearer. In this case: 'The boy rides the bike to the store'. In this case the sentences mostly describe action or relations, instead of the abolutes. Using the verb 'to be' makes the writer either allseeing or a passive victim. Using the previous example a passive sentence would become: 'The bike is ridden to the store by the boy.'
t ml/e-prime.html
E-prime helps me a lot in making my technical reports a lot more understandable and clearer.
For more information see:
http://www.wonderfulwritingskillsunhandbook.com/h
http://www.angelfire.com/nd/danscorpio/ep2.html/
The best way to improve writing is to give meaningful feedback to students. It seems so obvious to me, but it (almost) never happens. IMHO the best class I ever took was an introduction to philosophy class my junior year of high school, and of course, it was taught by the best teacher I have ever had. It was also, perhaps surprisingly, the lowest course grade I got in all of high school. Every single assignment I got back I without a doubt earned the grade written on it. Every mistake I made in my papers, such as lack of detail or even too much detail, was clearly annotated in the margins. I was then able to change what I did wrong. If there was ever a doubt on something I talked to the teacher and he clearly told me how to improve it.
Now four years later I am an engineering student at UT. The problem with *every* writing class I have taken in college is the focus of *assessment* of writing, not improvement. My first semester in college I was very studious and even met with the TA before the first paper was due in my Introduction to Philosophy class. When I met with her she, concisely, like my paper and gave me no recommendations for improvement. When I got my grade back, at the bottom of the last page she had written "good" and an 88. That was it, no other comments of explanation. I can't fix what I don't know they want me to change.
I also just want to articulate that that comments have to be meaningful, and detailed. In my upper-division technical writing class the most memorable assignment handed back to me was 5 pages long, exactly, which was the maximum length for the assignment. There were about two sentences of scribbled feedback that amounted to "not enough detail." The paper was written by my four person group, and after talking to the professor, none of us still understood how we could have more detail without exceeding the page count.
Bottom line, at the college level, I don't think there is any way to improve writing aside from individually looking at what is done wrong and fixing it. Everyone knows "how" to write on a conceptual level, and every student consequently writes in a way he thinks is correct. Unless problematic issues are pin-pointed, no college writing course will improve writing. Bottom line is that if you want a good writing class, you have to be willing to give detailed and meaningful feedback.
All the people I know who can write well are people who read extensively for pleasure. As far as I'm concerned, outside of Mathematical pursuits, the majority of education should be replaced by efforts to whet people's interest to read, and then not harassing them with lectures. The average lecturer, while by no means a stupid person, is far less eloquent or erudite than some of those whose thoughts one can encounter by way of the written english word. Try to convince your students that they have something to gain by reading Jane Austen, or Mark Twain. Ideally, go back in time and convince them of this when they're nine or ten, and install enough gumption in them to ignore much of their 'schooling' in favor of their education.
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.
Anything other than a general interest topic (like the 1960s, ideas about the American West, or fairy tales) isn't an option.
These are TERRIBLE subjects for engineers. Do you really want someone that enjoys deep, scientific analysis to suffer trying to analyze the 1960s, or the American West, or fairy tales?
And analyze he will! Or fail trying.
Some engineers simply won't put up with all the fuzzy thinking that's permitted in the humanities. They'll try to become social scientists first before writing the first sentence.
Remember, they're going to be engineers designing million dollar structures and systems. People MAY DIE if these engineers make a mistake. They need to know the science first. They need to understand their area thoroughly before proceeding.
Now you come along and ask them to engineer a paper about an enormous subject like the 1960s. Just how do you expect to them to be able to do that?So, in their desperation, they give you a mediocre paper back or nothing at all.
Remember your audience. You're not dealing with poets.
Lots of good stuff has already been recommended, so I'll add what I haven't seen here, apart from joining the voices that recommend writing for your audience; never let that though leave your mind.
Precision is key, whether practicing technical or creative writing. It is a truism that every word counts. Whether you are expounding about 'a thing', 'the thing', 'each thing', or 'every thing', you must be precise about which thingy you are on about.
To be sure, precision is not an easy writing skill to learn; you need to be able to ruthlessly excise fluff from your scribblings, and reread your own words from the perspective of others.
While I agree with the OP that grammar is not critical at the first stage, basic punctuation is essential - the well known 'eats shoots and leaves' example proves that point.
Metaphor might be left aside in the early stages, but English is an idiomatic language and much of its colour comes from those idioms.
From what you have written, you are teaching folk who will be writing from positions of professional authority. That being so, metaphor is unlikely to be an issue, but common faults such as tautology and cliches will be - their use diminishes the authority of writer in the reader's mind.
Now to a specific point of personal pedantry: The clearest divide that I see between authoritative and also ran writing is in the use of prepositions.
In your own case you said, "First, let's head a couple wagons off at the pass". In this case, the missing preposition after 'couple' is commonly seen on the internet - it's kinda slang brung over from speech - but would be edited immediately (both in the US and elsewhere). No-one would say, 'a pride lions' or 'a swarm bees'.
That wasn't meant as an ad hominem attack, but it served to make my point. The list of abuse of/in/with propositions is long, but, used correctly, they add precision to a text.
If I were in your shoes, I would want to make clear to my students that there is a broad range of topics to keep in mind when writing, but that mastery isn't necessary to communicate authoritatively. However, to ignore them will result in writing that never gains the air of authority and will thus be treated as such.
One final suggestion: midmaps. For folk who find difficulty in moving their ideas from mind to paper, mindmaps are often a boon.
Marc
One of the best classes I had in college was a creative writing class focused on science fiction; first off it was interesting to me while teaching me elements of proper writing. The reading we did was about the technical side of writing like plot and character. But we had to have something writing for almost every class, just a page or two and we would pass them around to comment on. With one or two read in front of the class and discussed.
Creative writing is a bit different than technical or business writing and in this case you might want to focus on those. Doing oddball projects like write a history of the world in one page for CEOs, and nuclear physics for 3-year-olds help focus your writers on length and audience limitations.
One of the best pieces of advice I've gotten on business writing was from my father-in-law who used to work for Ford. It was-Business people are busy, so fit it on one page and leave the details to an appendix.
Grond can breach it. Grond can breach anything.
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.
You could try to impress this point on the students. One value of a class like this is improving their writing ability. Another value is improving their ability to improve their own writing down the road.
Aside from grammar, what I've found most useful is peer review. Knowing that my peers will be reading a piece of text dramatically improves my desire to produce quality writing. At the same time, correcting others' writing improves my skills at critiquing my own writing and draws my attention to errors that I might be making myself. Being able to see the difference between a great essay, a mediocre essay, and a lousy essay will go a long way towards convincing them that they should put some effort in beyond the first draft. You can also get a lot more write-review cycles in because you don't have to read them all yourself.
It got rid of a lot of the fear, and it got me started.
I now write considerably better than I talk, but that's another story.
I figured out many years after highschool that the reason why so few people understand how to write:
I think it is quite possible that most of the English teachers in North America know less about technical writing or writing essays in the social sciences than the average engineering undergrad. Infact, English teachers are the least qualified people to teach you how to write.
PhysEd teachers have a better chance of teaching you how to write!
(The most annoying part of communicating with my coworkers is translating English written with Chineese grammar into English with English grammar.)
Writing "crap" code (random variable names, somewhat haphazard organization, few design patterns) is a valid technique for getting the code out there so you have something concrete to work with. You'd probably best have spent some low number of years - say, five - writing high quality code first, so you know how to do that automatically and you're dropping quality for a valid reason, not just laziness.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.