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

Irony

[Ninwa]

wuldn't it be ironik if no1 respondid?

From personal experience

[pHatidic]

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)

Re:From personal experience

[Anonymous Coward]

And yet, you use the word chiasmus...

Suggestions...

[Jjeff1]

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.

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.

Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice

[bigdavex]

In all my experience as an engineer, the most important thing is to use active voice. For those unaware of what this means, here's an example:

Passive: The boy *is riding* his bike to the store.
Active: The boy *rides* his bike to the store.

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.

I'm so sorry, but I must.

[SetupWeasel]

Horrifying grammar is a common problem, but its not a problem I can fix in a semester-long class.

it's

That depends

[MsWillow]

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.

Present writing as an engineering problem

[MarkusQ]

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:

• Top down design Starting with an outline and working out the details is the normal way of tackling an engineering problem.
• Checking your facts Engineers should be used to checking anything that is even remotely doubtful before committing to it. So should writers.
• Failure mode analysis For each sentence ask yourself, could it be misread? How? What is the best way to fix it?
• Dependency analysis Are the ideas presented in an order that assures that each point can be understood on the basis of the readers assumed knowledge and the information provided by preceding points?
• Optimization Are there any unnecessary parts? Does the structure require the reader to remember to many details at once, before linking them?
• Structured testing If you read what you have written assuming only the knowledge that the reader can be expected to have, does each part work the way you intended? If you read it aloud, does it sound the way you intended?

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

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.

Re:A Grammar system helps

[NMerriam]

I would agree with this completely -- the best use of a semester would be to show students how to approach the organization of written information. This should actually be second nature to engineers, as they frequently are called upon to organize and categorize things, yet their writing tends to lack the clarity of purpose that a good writer brings through proper organization.

One thing I notice is that people unaccustomed to writing formal papers tend to adopt a very stilted and affected style, thinking it sounds more "official", but it is usually just confusing. As students are writing, some of the most helpful things you can show them are the areas where they sound unnatural. While there's entirely too many people writing in an overly-conversational way online (essentially writing the words they would speak), one of the keys to compelling writing is to be natural and give it some personality.

Writing Workshop at Bell Labs, ~1980

[billstewart]

I worked at Bell Labs after college, and a critical piece of required training was a writing course. I don't remember who ran it, probably some outside teaching firm, but it was really really valuable to me. A couple of the critical lessons

• Write like a newspaper reporter, not a grad student.
• Your objective is clear communication to the reader, not beauty or eruditeness or narration of your discoveries and reasoning process. Don't waste their time, or at least don't waste it up front.
  
• Hit the important conclusions in the first few sentences so your reader will read them. If you'd like to wrap up with them at the end of your memo, that's fine too, in case anybody's still reading by then, but conclusions come first.
  
• If you're trying to express something complex, simplify your writing so it doesn't get in the way. For something simple, 10th grade language structures will do, but if it's really hairy stuff, back down to 8th grade or so.
  (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 :-)
• Think about what your audience knows and doesn't know, and what they want and don't want. Express things in terms of what they know and want, not what _you_ know.
  
• If you want somebody to do something, tell them specifically. The passive voice indicates that things will or should be or were done, and may optionally refer to who they might be or have been done by - in business, it's perfectly ok to tell people that you want them to do stuff, and politely expressing the valuableness of the acheivement of doneness of stuff not only doesn't tell the person you want to do stuff to do it, it often leads to later arguments about responsibility, scope creep in contracts, or simply to stuff not getting done which causes projects to fail.
  
• Yes, this probably means unlearning almost everything you were taught about writing in college. Sometimes it means unlearning what you learned back as far as junior high school.

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.