I have a lot of what I consider great ideas for my engineering communication class, but I just don’t have the time to use them all. When I try, the course becomes a crazy quilt (and I mean “crazy”) of activities and assignments. It becomes way to complicated for students to keep track of. If you’re not living it now, remember or imagine the life of a graduate student in engineering at UCLA. You are pulled in many directions, at the beck and call of your advisor, feeling squeezed between a set of challenging expectations, and trying to meet multiple deadlines. And then I show up to teach your required writing course, all “la-di-da, this is going to be so fun,” BUT you have to check the course website every few minutes to keep up with a large set of mostly-not-very-time-consuming but surprisingly many assignments. That’s just too high a cognitive load to add to the ones these students already have. So, on the course front: simplify, simplify, simplify. And here, at Writineering: get all those other ideas off my chest. If you have the time to try some, alone or with others in your labs, you’ll get multiple positive outcomes. And you’ll be saving some stressed graduate students from my inflicting them with these ideas now! So, just to get you started, here’s big, huge suggestion number one: Read Alan Alda’s book If I Understood You, Would I Have this Look on My Face: My Adventures in the Art and Science of Relating and Communicating (2017). And then try out some of his suggestions. While you wait for the book to arrive**, you can start trying to identify the emotions of the people you meet throughout the day. Nothing else, just spend a moment pondering their expressions and behaviors, and then think “grumpy” or “tired” or “cheerful” (or whatever else seems appropriate). Why? For one, you’ll start to notice how often you just barge into a conversation without paying any attention to the other person’s receptivity or mood. Second, you’ll be developing a habit of attention. Third, you’ll probably get better at identifying moods, since your subsequent interaction will give you feedback about how accurate you were. And fourth, you’ll be able to choose your words more appropriately, and have a more productive conversation, with this information at hand. Let me know if you find other benefits, too! ** A note about getting books. I have a lot of ways of accessing books, so I’m going to describe them here. You can probably find similar resources where you live, although the collections might not be as huge. First, I can order it new or used online. This is great: you own the book! But you also have to find shelf space for it, and you have to wait a couple of days. (Of course, you could read it, and then start passing it around to your friends and colleagues—this leads to fun conversations.) Second, I can go to Hoopla and connect to the Los Angeles Public Library, and they usually have the e-book or an audiobook that I can download. I can also go directly to the LAPL website, find the book, and it’s often available by download through Amazon or I can ask them to deliver the physical copy to my local branch library. If they don’t have it, I can check the e-resources of other local library systems (in my wallet are cards for the Beverly Hills Library, the Pasadena/Glendale Library, the Santa Monica Library, and the Culver City Library, but between LA and Beverly Hills, I can pretty much access what I need). You, too, can probably join more than one library system near you. Third, I can use the UCLA Library and even interlibrary loans to get almost any book for free. Sometimes interlibrary loans are a long wait, however.
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Data on the need to define terms
Often, engineering writers tell me that they do not need to define their terms because their audiences know what they are talking about. So this week, I did an experiment in two classes, one of 18 students and one of 23 students. They were to write down words and phrases that they need to use when discussing their work. And then we passed the lists to every other person in class, who each marked the words they did not know. They might have heard them before, but they would have to look them up, or they’d feel that the term was vague or ambiguous. In short, they’d like it to be defined. Here’s the data.
There were close to 400 unique terms, and about half of them were familiar to most people (no more than two people, or about 10%, were confused by them). But about half confused more people than that, and some confused over 60% of the people in the room.
I want to emphasize that everyone was a PhD student in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Dept. at UCLA. They’ve all passed their preliminary exam. They are the most informed audience one might hope to have, beyond one’s lab partners. Yes, we sometimes talk to people in our very specific fields, but others should be able to understand us, too! When you go ranging around the literature for ideas, you’d like to feel that the authors are trying to help you!
I hope to continue this exercise with future classes, so I can collect more data.
One note: if there are several numbers to the right of a term, that means that more than one person put it on his or list list. In the smaller class, no term was listed by more than two people; in the bigger class, some terms were listed by four people.
Your reading is as important as your writing
While I’m trying to get us all to write as clearly as we can, some texts are just difficult to read. Those texts are still worthwhile; they may even be more important.
The difficulty may come out of not having enough experience with the genre or the content. It might be that the author is making a very tight distinction, one that’s hard to pick up. It might be that the content is deeply philosophical, or that the ideas are so surprising that the reader keeps trying to get the words to mean something more familiar.
But the difficulties do not mean that the text should be ignored. Yes, I want writers to be as clear as they can. I want them to be as easy to read as possible. But not all things are easy. And sometimes simplicity involves cutting too much out. Lots of material is complex. You know this in engineering, and you probably also have a pretty good idea that other areas—economics, ethics, cultures, psychology, even just describing a moment in the world the way that it happened—are complex, too.
Sometimes when you say “fine” in response to “how are you?” you mean it. But usually there’s a lot more that could be said. Keeping it simple is not always accurate!
I recommend this article by Tegan Bennet Daylight in The Guardian (12/25/17): “’The difficulty is the point’: teaching spoon-fed students how to really read.” Daylight is a college teacher in Australia, but the description of her experiences seems relevant to the ways that many students approach reading: if it’s not easy, completely “relatable,” then it’s not going to get read.
I’d love for you to go read this whole article, but I’ll still share my favorite paragraph with you. After citing a single first sentence of a novel, she writes,
If you are reading this essay, you’re a reader. You probably know this sentence, and if you don’t, you are comfortable with interpreting it. You can hear a character beginning to form: its romantic, optimistic, nostalgic voice; a voice yearning for simplicity; probably, in its deliberate imitation of a child’s singsong, the voice of a woman, a mother. You know it might take a few pages to learn just who this woman is. You’re skilled in this sort of patience.
That’s completely true. Familiarity with the process of reading a novel means that a person has the patience and anticipation to wonder what might be coming next. This works for novels, and it also works for science writing.
For example, I had always enjoyed reading as a kid, but when I moved to another country I did not have much access to books in English. There weren’t any English-language children’s books, so I started reading classics (Robert Louis Stephenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, etc.). They were hard. It was frustrating at first. I’d start a book and give up. Gradually, out of desperation, I pushed through a few. And I came to realize that it just took a few chapters to get used to the types of sentences characteristic of each author. I got “skilled in this sort of patience.”
And the same is true for academic writing in science and engineering. If a reader just starts at the beginning, they are likely to be overwhelmed by the jargon in the abstract. But knowing where to find help—which sections might be more elementary, where terms might be defined, etc—gives someone a leg up. And then patience, confidence that this CAN be figured out (but not read linearly, until much later) will lead to success.
Finally, read. Read books. Read the New York Times. Read the New York Review of Books. (And let me know what your reading, so I can read it, too! What DO working engineers read, that they talk about together?) Daylight concludes that she wants her students to “to discover that if they learn to handle language they’ll no longer be helpless, drowning in sugary gratification.” And she wants “them to see that reading breeds thinking, and thinking breeds resistance.” That’s what I want for my students, too. Read and be provoked to think and act. I want you to express yourselves–after taking some time to read and to think what that really means.
Introducing the hard stuff
My class this quarter has gotten used to us talking about the “topography” of any piece of writing. It seems to be a helpful word in many situations, but now I want to discuss the varying levels (or altitudes) of difficulty as one moves through the landscape of the text. Sometimes the writing is hard, and sometimes it’s got to be easy (or the reader will give up). This variation is mandatory in public science writing, but you might be kind enough to give your readers a break in your academic writing, too.
In his (public-focused but pretty difficult) 2017 book Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst, Robert Sapolksy writes these two paragraphs as part of the introduction to an early chapter:
This chapter is one of the book’s anchors. The brain is the final common pathway, the conduit that mediates the influences of all the distal factors to be covered in the chapters to come. What happened an hour, a decade, a million years earlier? What happened were factors that impacted the brain and the behavior it produced.
This chapter has two major challenges. The first is its god-awful length. Apologies; I’ve tried to be succinct and nontechnical, but this is foundational material that needs to be covered. Second, regardless of how nontechnical I’ve tried to be, the material can overwhelm someone with no background in neuroscience. To help with that, please wade through appendix 1 around now.
(pp. 21-2)
Notice several things here:
1. He offers “metacommentary” that communicates these messages: “What I’m about to say is important.” “This is complicated, but I’m doing my best to make it as easy and clear as possible.” “If you have not taken neuroscience, then go read Appendix 1.”
2. He offers motivating questions for this section: “how does the brain work?” and “how did the brain get the way it is?”
3. That last question is attached to the book’s overall argument in that first paragraph above: he is trying to explain all the factors that go into our behavior, factors that are immediately present and factors that happened long ago. If you’re going to make readers work hard at something, they need to know that there’s a really important reason for them to do so!
4. He uses numbers. Imagine that second paragraph without the numbers, and you will be seeing a less clear paragraph. It’s very satisfying for readers to know exactly how many ideas they are about to get, and then to tick them off. “Two. Okay: One, Two. Done!”
5. He uses the word “distal.” I probably would have avoided that. I had to look it up. It basically means “distant,” but it’s more specific to anatomy.
If you actually go read the rest of Sapolky’s book, you’ll see him describing the way that our emotional experience influences our intellectual decisions. If your readers get frustrated—especially if they think that this is more your fault than theirs—then they are going to be less likely to make positive evaluation. Their emotions, not just logic, will influence their decisions.
Freedom within expectations
If you tell someone you’re an engineer, you might then get the feeling that they think that they know a lot about you already. Engineers—like people in many careers—have to contend with all sorts of presumptions about their personalities. That’s one reason why #ilooklikeanengineer was popular and important. That movement emphasized that women are engineers, but the presumptions can work against everyone. Engineers are not just (and not always) introverted and analytical. That’s just a stereotype. Engineers are all sorts of other ways, too: active, athletic, enthusiastic, assertive, creative, instinctive, chatty, disorganized, artistic, and friendly–and they have as many individual interests as there are individuals.
What this means is that you are always contending with a stereotype. If you are aware of it—and how could you not be?—you are always deciding if you want to conform to peoples’ assumptions or not. And you probably make different decisions in different situations. It’s sometimes easier just to let others think you are brilliant and quiet: they are giving you the benefit of the doubt, and you don’t have to explain yourself. Other times, it’s convenient and even maybe fun to break the stereotype: surprising people can get their attention. If you think back, you can probably think of many examples of yourself doing one or the other.
And here’s why I said all this: the same goes for genres of writing. Each type or category of text shares characteristics. Academic journal articles in electrical engineering are (1) about EE, (2) written in formal English using some language only known to people in the specific field (but not exclusively this type of language), and (3) follows a certain structure (AIMRaD, and then similar structures within each of those sections). If you were to look at a single journal article, you could define that journal’s genre of academic writing even more specifically. And then you could mimic it, structuring your own ideas in an article that fit the expectations of that journal.
But then think about your identity again. How much do you want to conform? If you looked at several articles in that journal, you would notice a range of acceptable writing choices. You would see characteristics they all share (posing a problem, giving a result, etc.) and you’d see variation (in how much context is offered, perhaps, or how many field-specific terms are defined, or the clarity of the figures and captions). Seeing this variation enables you to stop just mimicking a genre. Instead, you can take into account your own goals and values, and then make the decisions that allow you to stay within the general range of the journal’s expectations but still express yourself as you choose.
Engineering education
I’m always trying to think of ways to improve undergraduate education, and particularly undergraduate engineering education. This desire comes out of my own experiences entering UCLA as an undergraduate electrical engineering major. I took a bunch of random, disconnected classes. (I think my first quarter was the third class in a calculus sequence, introductory chemistry, and a cultural anthropology class.) After a year, I hadn’t learned much about what engineers did, I’d discovered chemistry was surprisingly difficult for me, and I had fallen in love with programming (in Pascal; this was 1984). For some reason, this random set of data encouraged me to switch to the Computer Science and Engineering major. After a bunch more physics and math, and a bit of computer architecture, I still had no idea what engineers did besides think about resistors. I got a part-time job at Hughes Aircraft as an Assistant Engineer, and I discovered that testing hardware was scary but that it was fun to follow engineers around and ask them questions so I could write down what they were doing and why. That experience, however, convinced me that I did not want to be an engineer–largely because I didn’t like working at a big defense corporation. But what if I’d had a different introduction to engineering, one that focused on what I could do with that knowledge, on imagining what I valued and how I could further those values with engineering skills, and one that centered on solving problems, not memorizing formulas for problem sets? I had actually entered engineering school with ambitious ideals for what I would accomplish, but nobody asked me about those, and none of my classes seemed related to them.
So when I read about a curriculum that immediately reveals to students how engineers think, and not only that, but also motivates socially conscious students to work hard in their engineering classes to bring about the changes they envision in the world, I am interested.
The book is A Whole New Engineer: The Coming Revolution in Engineering Education by David E Goldberg and Mark Somerville (with Catherine Whitney, who I assume did much of the writing!). They tell the story of the founding of Olin College of Engineering (started in 2000), the thinking behind the curriculum, and the ways that these ideas have been (and can be) borrowed by and adapted to much larger institutions. It’s a fascinating story in itself, and I’ll probably offer several posts on some of the key ideas. Here I’ll just add its general ideas about how to get students personally, intrinsically motivated:
- “Autonomy: making meaningful choices is a cornerstone of intrinsic motivation” (159). This means letting students make some choices; it means trusting them. “Autonomy-supportive instructors . . . spend more time listening, give fewer directives, ask more questions about what students want, verbalize fewer solutions to problems, make more emphatic statements, and offer greater support for students’ internalization of the learning goals” (159).
- “Purpose/Relatedness: Doing things that matter to your peers and to the world at large, increases intrinsic motivation” (163). This means both that students need to have sense of connection with a community for which they are designing their products, and they also need a sense of responsibility to the very people with whom they are working. Discussing the global influences of engineering, encouraging them to see how engineering has improved people’s lives (and when it has failed to do so), and having them work in teams are ways to accomplish this goal.
- “Mastery: Being effective increases intrinsic motivation”(164). This means that students need to be given opportunities to get better. They need to do something, get feedback, and improve that thing. They need to be encouraged to reflect on their accomplishments, asking “What was done well?” and “What can be improved?” (165)
The book offers many stories, and both general and specific ideas about education, curriculum, and classroom practices. I recommend that every teacher read it. I’d love to know what you think.
Advice welcome!
I’m hoping to get advice on three points, all intersecting with EE and engineering writing and pedagogy.
First, the EE TAs are going to be trained next year (by me), and while I have a good idea of my plans, I’d like some input. What did you wish you knew when you started teaching? Now that some of you are faculty, you might have an even more urgent message about that, but anyone who was a struggling, hard-working, responsible TA probably wishes they’d been given a few ideas to work with. What are they??
Second, the School of Engineering has asked Writing Programs to teach first-year composition courses directed specifically at students who have entered as engineering majors. The one and only section (so far) of English 3E is this Fall, and we have some constraints on what we achieve in there, but I’d be interested to hear what you’d include in that class. The two new areas to be emphasized, in addition to what we already teach about college composition, are “the visual display of information” and “exposition/description” (contrast that with “argument” and you might get a sense of what it means and why it’s useful for engineers). I don’t want to focus just on engineering-related topics (engineering majors get enough engineering classes!), but I want to make sure that the course offers a helpful bridge between other disciplines, writing, and engineering. Any thoughts?
And third, I need to write on this website more often, so I’d be interested in hearing what topics you have questions about (or what stories or ideas you’d be interested in sharing here!). I will try to write a few posts in advance, so that there will be a more regular posting during the busy Fall quarter.
Thanks, in advance, for your help.
A book recommendation
I’ve just discovered a book by Robert Irish and Peter Eliot Weiss that I highly recommend. In fact, I intend to use it in EE 295 next year, instead of my EE 295 Sketchbook. It’s too bad that I can’t use both, but I don’t want students to have to make both purchases. I can always use some handouts from the Sketchbook and/or recommend that students borrow a copy from a friend for the quarter.
So what’s this great book: Engineering Communication: From Principles to Practice, 2nd edition.
I have not actually read the first edition, so it may not be that different, and you can get it for a few dollars (as opposed to $25-$65 for the second edition).
If you are working on improving your writing in engineering, I cannot recommend any book more than this one. More later–when I have time to tell you more about it.
Why a cow? I haven’t yet taken a picture of the book–and this is a beautiful cow!
Key words in key spots; paragraphs as musical movements
My class depends on students bringing in and showing us models, and one student brought in “A Wideband Frequency-Shift Keying Wireless Link for Inductively Powered Medical Implants” by Maysam Ghovanloo and Khalil Najafi (IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems, 51.12, Dec 2004). The full title is here so you can access it yourself (I’d be happy to discuss these writers’ decisions in more detail with you), but I’ve tried to include examples of the two key features mentioned above so that you do not have to go find it yourself.
Key Words in Key Spots
Notice that the authors do not start with data and power transmission via inductive coupling alone. Since they are so intent upon biomedical implants, this idea goes into the first sentence of the introduction, too:
Note that the sentence begins with “an inductive link” and ends with “prostheses”–both key words, and in the two prime spots in the sentence. Remember that the beginning and end of a sentence are the “prime real estate.”
And later, the first sentence of the last paragraph of the introduction reminds readers of these two important components of the article, (1) increasing bandwidth via the inductive method of FSK, and (2) using this to make biomedical prosthesis work better:
Again, “FSK” is in one prime position, and “prostheses” is in the other.
Paragraphs as musical movements
The second and third paragraphs of the introduction are very clear, step-by-step discussions/explanations that boil down the problem to these authors’ point of attack. Here’s paragraph two:
Notice how this paragraph moves from “need large amounts of data” to “a minimum of 625-1000 pixels” to specific numbers of bits in the stimulation commands, to how many bits per command frame, to how many of those there are, to one piece of good news about lowering the required data rate, to the obvious conclusion that a high data rate is needed. It’s like the paragraph is reaching a crescendo in a musical piece, with one softening part near the end, and then a loud, loud final sentence.
Paragraph 3 does something similar with the data rates that have been achieved so far, although the data rate seems to be getting softer/lower as we add the costs/trade-offs, and then it ends with a strong determination to do better/the goal:
If you are a musician, or if you just like to listen to music, then thinking about paragraphs as short movements in a musical composition might help you structure them so that they come across more powerfully.
An addition, to underline the importance of key words in key spots:
The American Scholar has a list of what it calls “the ten best sentences.” Here’s one, with the reasons that Roy Peter Clark gave for why it’s great:
Anger was washed away in the river along with any obligation.—Ernest Hemingway, “A Farewell to Arms”
Donald Murray used to preach the 2-3-1 rule of emphasis. Place the least emphatic words in the middle. The second most important go at the beginning. The most important nails the meaning at the end. Hemingway offers a version of that here. A metaphor of flowing water is framed by two abstractions Anger and Obligation. That fact that the metaphor is drawn from the action of the narrative makes it more effective.
Miscellaneous Updates
I am newly committed to this website, now that the Non-Senate Faculty Grant that was to pay for it has finally been paid! Please do let me know what types of topics you’d like to see covered on here. I can just go ahead and write short entries about topics such as agency and verbs and word order and paragraphing (etc) but I’d also like to bring up broader issues that confront you now as a publishing engineer. And perhaps begin a conversation about these.
On another topic, I hope that this link to an article that I just got published will both (1) pleasantly surprise you by being on a completely different topic from usual, and (2) let you see how even a journal article in an interdisciplinary journal in the humanities and social sciences follows some similar structural rules as you engineering articles.
Here’s my publication: “New Terms of Worth”: The Inclusive Economics of Robert Frost’s Poetry.
Even Oxford University Press has trouble with formatting. I’m hoping that this problem (the small print after the indented quotations of poetry) will be fixed soon!
