Writing Like An Engineer

Although rhetoric is essential to engineering, the common meanings of rhetorical terms make them difficult to apply in any straightforward way to writing. Rhetoric developed historically in the arena of politics and public discourse where the goals are very different than they are in technical work. A political address is obviously persuasive in a way that a progress report or a test report is not. In traditional terms, these reports would usually be classified as descriptive rather than persuasive. Yet, such documents have to use a species of persuasion if they are to be of any use. These documents are intended to accomplish work, and such accomplishment usually means changing something. The thing or state to be changed can range from the way people think to the way a technical product functions, but it is possible to see such inducement of change as a species of persuasion that standard rhetorical theories do not address very well. Engineers tend to prefer saying that they are being convincing rather than persuasive, and the very fact that they choose a different term suggests that, at least for them, persuasion has associations that are not applicable to the relationship between engineers and their readers. Typically, they apply the term persuasion only to manipulative attempts at change, and have trouble seeing its relevance in other kinds of change-inducing action.

The guide looks at the interaction between engineering epistemology and engineering practice in the area of rhetoric and particularly in the area of writing. Folk wisdom has it that engineers are bad writers. This is, a belief that deserves some consideration. What does it mean to write badly or well as an engineer? Why should a group of intelligent, educated people write less well than, say, biologists? This belief reflects a devaluation of language and particularly of writing in the field of engineering. That is, engineers have particular problems in accepting the rhetorical view of knowledge.

This guide is a longitudinal multiple case study that probes novice engineers' understanding of their own rhetorical role as it changed over the course of a 5-year cooperative education program. It examines how four undergraduate engineering students thought about the writing they did as part of their co-op work experience. It attempts to look specifically at the relationship between becoming an engineer and particular uses of and attitudes toward rhetoric. In doing so, it looks not only at what engineers can learn from rhetoric but also at what rhetoricians can learn from the writing practices of engineers.