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Teaching Engineers to Write?
Posted by
Cliff
on Sat May 06, 2006 10:20 PM
from the let's-have-less-failures-in-communication dept.
from the let's-have-less-failures-in-communication dept.
$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?"
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Irony (Score:5, Funny)
A Grammar system helps (Score:5, Interesting)
http://www.lbt-languages.de/english/lernhilfe/ler
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Insightful)
Wouldn't it be more correct to say "As a (former, and, I hope, future) writing instructor"? as "hopefully" is an (almost universally mis-used) adverb?
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Informative)
Function: adverb
Date: circa 1639
1 : in a hopeful manner
2 : it is hoped : I hope : we hope
usage In the early 1960s the second sense of hopefully, which had been in sporadic use since around 1932, underwent a surge of popular use. A sur
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Insightful)
E-mail,
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Insightful)
Unfortunatly this inability to split what you write about into short blocks of text that addre
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words: know when to start a new paragraph. It immeasurably impr
Re:A Grammar system helps (Score:3, Funny)
If that's really how bad things are, my southern brothers, I think it's time to rise up against the status quo, and bring about a REVOLUTION! VIVA! VIVA! VIVA LOS
What?! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:What?! (Score:5, Insightful)
From personal experience (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Writing Workshop at Bell Labs, ~1980 (Score:5, Insightful)
(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.
Highschool Teaching Problems (Score:4, Insightful)
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.)
Hasn't Helped (Score:2)
When I was a wee lad ... (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:When I was a wee lad ... (Score:5, Funny)
Suggestions... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Suggestions... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 [upenn.edu] by linguist Geoff Pullum.
Re:Suggestions... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Suggestions... (Score:4, Interesting)
Get "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser.
Here are the most worthwhile chapters:
http://www.cla.wayne.edu/polisci/kdk/general/sour
The rest of the book is okay, but these three chapters are simply inspired.
Left Brain, Right Brain (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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:Ideas flow better when I write well to start wi (Score:3)
Re:Ideas flow better when I write well to start wi (Score:3)
I'm so sorry, but I must. (Score:5, Funny)
it's
Re:I'm so sorry, but I must. (Score:4, Funny)
That depends (Score:5, Funny)
Invest the time (Score:4, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
Present writing as an engineering problem (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Read well written writings (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Spelling, grammar (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Two books on writing and writing style helped me (Score:3, Informative)
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 [amazon.com]
For Formal Articles, Books, Papers, etc, you need you use this book:
Clear and Simple as the Truth, by Francis-Noel Thomas [amazon.com]
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
How I Helped My Roommate (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
kkkkk (Score:3)
Just Reading. (Score:3, Informative)
Remember engineers are YOUR audience. (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Precision (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:3)
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."
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:5, Insightful)
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...)
Re:Active voice, active voice, active voice (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Writing is just a tool...like any other.... (Score:3, Interesting)