The common conception of engineering is mainly focused on the mathematics and scientific portion of the field. Through my research and interview, i have learned this is not true. While getting the actual solution to a problem is ultimately the goal of the engineering process, the results mean nothing if they cannot be communicated properly. I learned through my interview process that writing could take up as much as half of an engineer’s professional time. Most of this writing is composed of things such as emails, journals, proposals, books, the list goes on. A majority of the task in these writings is communicating results in a clear, but efficient way. While an engineer does spend a lot of time writing scholarly pieces of work that is meant for professionals in their field, they also must learn to communicate to their clients, or the general public, without the use of all the technical jargon they and their peers learned through years of school. After analyzing many examples of writing in engineering, i found that the main contrasts between the different genres was the format and the language selection.
Format
As many people know, engineers approach their work in a very systematic way. This does not change for how they approach their writing. Whether it be comparing a technical report to a peer-reviewed journal, or simply an email to a memo, every genre of writing in engineering requires a specific format to serve a certain purpose. For example, while a formal technical report and a journal may look similar and discuss the same topic, a formal technical report must be formatted so a person could pick out the relevant information they need without having to read the entire report. The difference in formats is due to the different purposes the papers are written for.
Formal technical reports
Part of my research was an interview with one of my engineering professors, Allen Bradley, in which we discussed his personal experience with writing in the engineering field. To my surprise, I was told that almost half of his professional time was dedicated to writing. This summer alone, Professor Bradley wrote 2 one hundred page technical reports, which is the most common genre of scholarly writing in engineering. Not only is formal technical writing the most common type of writing, it is also the most systematic. The format of a technical report is what differentiates a good report from a bad one. Every aspect, from the title to the references page, must be methodical and organized to a point.
To start, the title of a report must not just introduce the general topic of the report, it must also explain what specific field is being discussed. For example, a title such as “advanced monitoring systems” may sound as if it introduces enough information about the report that follows, but it is not sufficient for a formal technical report. The actual title for that report is “Developments in integration of advanced monitoring systems” (Oborski, 2014,). Notice how the title leaves no ambiguity to what is being discussed. Following the title is a summary. The summary section serves to state the topic, and main outcomes or conclusions to the report, and also to give the most important finding of the research. The next section, the table of contents is one of the most important pieces of the formal technical report because it is what allows the easy access of relevant information for a variety of audiences. As already stated, the main purpose of a formal technical report is to be able to easily communicate relevant information. For example if a construction engineer is supposed to build the product you designed for a problem, they do not need to read the purpose of the report, or the outcomes of your research, they only need to find the design section so they can fulfil their job requirement. After the table of contents is the introduction. The introduction is similar to the summary, except the goal of the introduction is to state the purpose, or problem being addressed, and to provide background technical information necessary to understand the context of the report. For example, in a report about innovations multimedia information retrieval, the introduction stated “Recent years have witnessed an explosive growth of multimedia data...As an important and challenging problem, effective multimedia information retrieval for such complicated multimedia data plays an important role in content-based multimedia analysis” (Zhao, Li, Zhang, 2015, p.2756). In this introduction, the purpose of the report is clearly stated, to find a solution to the growing difficulty of data retrieval. This also provides some background information in that it states that there has been an explosive growth of multimedia data. Once all the necessary background information is introduced and the purpose of the report is stated, the data is presented in the body. The data must be presented in a clear and organized manner, usually using charts, tables, and page breaks to separate information. The final section of the report is the conclusion. The purpose of the conclusion is to state whether or not the project achieved its goals, then give a brief summary of key findings and major outcomes of the project.
Non-Academic Format
While a large portion of writing in engineering is consumed by scholarly, peer-reviewed genres which require a very strict format, there are also many other types of non-academic genres that have their own specific formats. The structure of these different genres, while not as formulaic, are still vital to accomplishing the purpose of each genre of writing.
Two genres of writing that are very similar are memos and letters. The main difference between a memo and email is the title found in memos. The purpose of the title in a memo is that the reader could see the title of the memo, and decide whether or not to read it. Memos may also serve as a short report, which will change the format slightly in that heading and subheading may be added to separate information.
Another common type of non-academic writing are project proposals. Through my research i noticed that while the proposals did not have a strict format like the formal reports did, they did follow a general pattern in how the information was presented. The proposals usually began with an overview of the problem at hand and how they intend to solve it. Then they would state their goals of the project such as a “functional prototype” or “on board sensors and data acquisition”(Dartmouth college, 2016). These goals were often either features of the device being built, or what kind of analysis they plan to perform on the data. After the goals are stated, they typically include deliverables of the project. Usually stating why they should be funded and what the investors will gain. Next the required facilities and technical knowledge is stated. Finally there will be included something along the lines of a confidentiality and ownership rights agreement. While writing a proposal, an engineer is almost trying to sell their product to a consumer, so brevity and ease of access to information is vital, because after all, time is money in the business world.
Language Selection
Throughout my interview, the other main point that professor bradley highlighted was the importance of language selection when it comes to writing in engineering. A lot of this is due to the differences in audiences that comes with the different genres of writing in engineering. In today’s day and age, scientific and technical rhetoric is not just read by professionals in that field. It is also available to the general public, which means it must be able to be explained to an untrained audience.
Non-Academic
In the information age, anyone has access to new and upcoming innovations in technology and philosophy, so it is now part of an engineer's job to be able to communicate these ideas or innovations in a way that the general public can understand. Professor Bradley said that this aspect of writing was the hardest part to adjust to. He told me that in order to write to an uninformed audience, he must “get into their shoes, and try to write from a perspective that they would understand”(personal interview, 2016). This not only applies to avoiding technical jargon that most of the general public does not understand, it also means engineers must explain scientific ideas and theories using everyday concepts. Using easy to understand language is not the only challenge of writing in engineering, finding the correct balance between brevity and clarity is also vital to successfully communicating as an engineer.
The audience being written to is what influences the language selection for each genre the most. When writing to the general population, a writer must take this into account more than any of the other audiences. In my interview with professor bradley, we discussed a book he had helped write on the flood in iowa city a few years back. In this example he explained that the most difficult part of writing this book was explaining concepts such as the conservation of momentum or fluid dynamics in terms that could be understood by the general population in the most efficient manner possible. What is becoming more popular in scientific pop culture now is online or newspaper articles. There is now a field of writing in which the author is not only trying to get information out to the general public, it is also meant to entertain. So not only must they avoid confusing, overly-technical terms, they must also present the information in a way that is appealing to mind, rather than the usual headaches that many people are accustomed to in their science courses. To do this, authors of these articles typically include pictures or charts to summarize information visually, or allude to pop culture references such as “Our precious selfies, snaps of our felines, and shots of our cappuccinos—to say nothing of our texts, emails, and songs—have created a massive data set” (abrams, 2016). In this example, the author is relating to the audience by connecting an integral part of daily life into explaining a new innovation in data storage.Although the average science enthusiast may still be few and far between, the information age is allowing ease of access to any kind of new development in technology, creating a new wave of writing in engineering.
One of the audiences that is communicated with on a day to day basis is an engineer’s co workers. This frequent interaction calls for the most brevity in writing because most communication between the office is often read quickly to save time. This communication-emails, memos, letters, and any other kind of correspondence-is always straight to the point, keeping only relevant information. Although an engineer must keep his interactions with coworkers brief, he must also keep an appropriate tone for each specific audience. Different audiences within the workplace, such as a manager, colleague, investor, etc., all call for different tones. For example, when writing to a manager, an appropriate header to a letter would be “Mr. Jeffrey Peterson”, or a salutation of “Sincerely”(Bloom, 1997). if an engineer were writing a letter to his/her boss, they must still stay straightforward, but also be respectful of the audience at hand.
Academic
Whenever an engineer writes a scholarly journal or technical report, it is usually written to a specific, highly qualified audience. For this reason, the authors of these papers have the advantage of referencing advanced topics without having to explain many of them, which also helps keep the paper as brief as possible. For example, i came across a report on a new innovation in the retrieval of multimedia information. In this report the authors stated “Our proposed algorithm is a general learning to rank algorithm, which is composed of two key components” (Zhao, Li, Zhang, 2015, p.2758), and then went on to reference other types of algorithms without explaining what the different types entail. While an everyday person may understand the basics of what an algorithm is, they surely do not know the difference between a “rank algorithm” and a “feature learning algorithm” without years of specialized education. Being able to reference technical vernacular without having to explain also aids in keeping the papers as brief as possible.
Conclusion
In conclusion, writing plays a much larger role in the field of engineering than i would have assumed. The main factors that separate the writing styles of the different genres are the language selection and format. Formal technical writings must follow a strict format in order to make relevant information as easy to access as possible. In correspondances, the format serves to allow quick communication. In non-academic writing, language selection plays a much larger role, to ensure that the audience is able to understand what the author is trying to explain. Although the role of writing in engineering may not seem like a large one, the math and science portion would mean nothing if the solution to a problem is unable to be communicated properly.
