TECHNICAL WRITING

IN ENGINEERING

KIRSCH INCORPORATED 2017

~An inquiry of the education and expectations of engineering prospects~

Abstract

Purpose

This report contains a breakdown of how engineers are prepared to communicate

during education versus how they are expected to communicate on the job, hoping to
better prepare future engineers.

Technical Writing in Engineering

Way back in the summer of 2017, Kirsch Incorporated was tasked with their most
difficult project to date. Its objective? To find out whether or not engineers were being
prepared during higher education for the technical writing they would need to do in the
workplace. Many sources were thoroughly analyzed and an interview was done, and the
results were staggering. Our trained team had no choice but to conclude that engineers
are not properly prepared for the technical writing they are expected to do in the
workplace by their education.

Therefore, we at Kirsch Incorporated strongly recommend that the United States

focuses more attention on the technical writing needed in the engineering field. This
could take the form of required technical writing classes, publicly accessible writing
workshops geared towards engineers, better scaffolding in the workplace, and better
overall awareness of the necessity that is technical writing in engineering. Any of these
being applied will lead to a better work environment for engineering prospects.

This report will detail the stated problems, research, and conclusions made throughout
the duration of this project.
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Table of contents

Abstract 1

Introduction 3

Procedure 4

Problems 5

Conclusion 7

Recommendations 8

References 9

Contact Information 10

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 Introduction

Engineers in the United States are generally known as successful people. To get to the
point of being a well-off engineer, it is the expectation that one has to put in hard work. But
what if making it as an engineer is much harder than it has to be right now?

The problem
Engineers are not being properly prepared by their education for the technical writing they will
need in the workplace. This is due in part to the common assumption that engineers dont
need to know how to communicate very well. Many budding engineers are unaware that this is
an issue in their field until it is already too late. By the time they realize how many different
types of written communication they will be engaging in, engineers are already lacking in many
essential skills of technical writing.

Procedure
Much research was needed in order to prove that such a problem exists in such an established
field as engineering. Despite my lack of personal experience, I was able to get the insight of
Mitch Schultz, a very experienced engineer. I also had access to many different text sources
that benefitted my knowledge of the current education of engineers, what mechanics they are
expected to know, and what they are lacking in.

Conclusion
Due to the large amount of research I found pointing towards it, I eventually conclude that our
modern engineers are not adequately prepared for the jobs they are going into. Regardless of
how knowledgeable they are in their field, many engineers are unable to communicate their
ideas. But what can be done about this?

Recommendations
After learning of the extent of this problem, I pooled together ideas from my sources about
what can be done. Based off these, I would like to recommend that the United States pays
more attention to technical writing in engineering through the form of required technical writing
classes, publicly accessible writing workshops geared towards engineers, better scaffolding in
the workplace, and/or better overall awareness of the necessity that is technical writing in
engineering.

This report will continue to detail this problem, procedure, conclusion, and recommendations
throughout.
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 Procedure

As an aspiring engineer one year into my education, I have minimal experience in how
much the education process prepares engineers for all the technical writing they will do in the
workplace. Because of this I have consulted many sources in order to better educate myself on
the topic, listed below.

Writing a Technical Feature for EDN, an article written by the engineering

design website EDN. This article helped inform me of the style and mechanics
required in order to make a submission in the engineering community.
How Engineers Can Improve Technical Writing, an article written by Mark
Crawford for the site ASME. This article informed me of the key competencies of
technical writing and what engineers naturally have that help them with technical
writing, as well as a few pieces of advice on how they can improve their technical
writing.
How to Build Better Engineers: A Practical Approach to the Mechanics of
Text, an article written by professor Ron E. Smelser for the NWP. This article
highlights the issues that new engineers have with technical writing when
entering their field and how education can be used to improve this situation.

In addition to these sources, I used the Writing in Engineering section of the Purdue
Online Writing Lab in order to learn about the specific documents that engineers write and their
specific mechanics. This source provided five major resources, titled:

Writing Engineering Reports

Handbook on Report Formats
Engineering Projects in Community Service (EPICS)
INDOT Workshop Resources for Engineers
Mechanical Engineering Writing Enhancement Program

I also conducted a 45-minute interview with Mitch Schultz, the program chair of
Electrical Computer Engineering Technology at Western Technical College. Mitch worked as
an electrical technologist for three years prior to teaching electrical engineering for over 25
years, and he has seen the divide between engineers technical writing education and
expectations firsthand.
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 Problems

Using the many resources previously mentioned, I discovered one major problem that
exists in the engineering community with regard to technical writing. Simply put,

Engineers are not adequately prepared for the technical writing they are
expected to do in the workplace by their education.
This is due in part to a certain stigma that comes with being an engineer. Even in this
day and age, many people think that engineers dont need to know how to write and question
why we bother to teach them communication skills. While it is certainly true that a large part of
engineering is understanding the mathematics and technology of the field itself, this is useless
if the engineers ideas practicality and economic feasibility cannot be communicated. Below
are a few examples of engineering students attempts to make excerpts of their textbook
understandable to the common person:

A surface represents the only variety of non-Euclidean manifolds capable of actual visualization,
and the origin of the metrical geometry of non-Euclidean manifolds in general is found in the work of the
German mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss (1777-1855), professor of mathematics in the University of
Gttingen, in which the metrical geometry of an ordinary surface is developed from the standpoint of its
intrinsic properties, whereby is meant properties which require for their specification no elements which
lie outside the surface itself.

The radial stresses in this problem can be ignored because they are so small compared to the
other stresses and any failure they will have already had occurred before the radial stresses would
have had a chance to reach the yield point which in this case is possible because the radial stresses
are not significant as the width of the cross section near the neutral axis here is not too small and
relative to rest of the hook the section is large enough.

Transistors are semiconductor devices that can control the electrical current flowing between
two terminals of differing electrical potential based on a voltage applied to a third terminal called a gate.
This gate voltage controls the number of free charge carriers available at the junction of two dissimilar
semiconducting materials and therefore the current which flows between them.

As demonstrated by these students writing, the writing of engineers can be foreign to

anyone that does not understand the jargon. While engineers in training may be unaware of
what a problem this is, they quickly become conscious of this deficiency once in the field.
According to a survey of graduates of the University of Idaho College of Engineering, 40% of
graduates needed more training in written communication and 60% needed more in oral
communication. Most engineers only go through one technical writing class during their whole
time in higher education.
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 Problems (cont.)

Once in the workplace, engineers are expected to do more than simply write reports on
their work. The modern engineer spends at least fifty percent of their time writing many
different documents, including:

Proposals
Status reports
Meeting minutes
Trip reports
Lab experiments

The misperception of technical writings role in the field of engineering leads to new
engineers being poor at many necessary writing mechanics once they enter, such as:

Concise wording- Sentences do not need to be full of qualifiers and clauses.

Flowery language and bloated sentences are unnecessary.
Defining Jargon- The layperson will not understand all the phrases unique to
the engineering phrase. The language used should be understandable to a high
schooler.
Paragraph Cohesion- Just as sentences flow into one another, paragraphs
should be in an order that makes sense and make the document easier to read.
Active Tense- Sentences are naturally easier to read when the subject comes
before the predicate. Because engineers are so used to their textbooks being
flowery and using passive tense, they find themselves writing that way.
Information Relation- When relating old information to new information, put
the old information first to make the transition smooth. 6
 Conclusion

I. Engineers are not adequately prepared for the technical writing they are
expected to do in the workplace by their education.
A. There is a common misconception that engineers do not need to know how to
write very well.

B. Because of this, engineering students are taught to write in a way that closely
resembles their textbooks.

C. New engineers demonstrate a number of deficiencies in their workplace

writing.

Unless we bother to properly educate our future engineers, all newcomers to the field
will continue to be forced to find their own way to learn to communicate acceptably.

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 Recommendations

I highly recommend that our higher education system in the United States focuses more
attention on the technical writing needed in the engineering field. Any of the following
measures would help this cause:

Required technical writing classes- Even one more technical writing class
required for engineering majors would greatly help the students to be better prepared.

Writing workshops geared toward engineers- There are currently

sources available to help engineers improve their technical writing, but they are poorly
promoted, most must be paid for, and most are hosted by private sources that dont
necessarily have valid data. Publicly promoted writing workshops would benefit engineers of all
ages.

Scaffolding- Engineers are very used to following formulas. If they were given a
series of steps to follow while writing their documents, they would be much more comfortable
with it and do a better job.

Awareness- If there were greater emphasis of the importance of technical writing in

engineering, engineers could begin practicing and getting better at it from an early age.

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 References

(2012, Nov. 14). Writing a Technical Feature for EDN. http://www.edn.com/electronics-

blogs/using-edn/4401435/Writing-a-technical-feature-for-EDN-

Crawford, M. (2012, Sept.). How Engineers Can Improve Technical Writing.

https://www.asme.org/career-education/articles/business-writing/how-engineers-can-improve-
technical-writing

Smelser, R. E. (2001). How to Build Better Engineers: A Practical Approach to the Mechanics
of Text. https://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/241

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 Contact Info

If you have any further questions, comments, or complaints feel free to contact the Kirsch
Incorporated public representative, Brad Kirsch.

Brad Kirsch, man who has

only one picture of himself.

Phone: (608)-797-3405

Email:
[email protected]
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