Blog » Engineering the World of Writing
Posted on 05 Feb 2013 00:10
A common misunderstanding among society (especially college graduate students) is that engineers and scientists don’t need writing in their fields. However, many famous scientists and even my own self ridicule such a strong misconception. Aspiring to become a chemical engineer, I believe that writing is the main key skill that engineers need to survive. Communication between each in and every one of them is crucial and just doesn’t happen in thin air as seen from my own experiences. Their inventions and unique thinking into creating masses and masses of impacts in today’s world occur from one major concept: writing.
I have a quite bit of research experience over the years and seen some various interdisciplinary engineers perform their tasks in outside places and/or laboratories. Therefore, from my own standpoint, I believe that engineers utilize a lot of scientific research in order to carry out their thoughts and innovative ideas. However, they are not able to complete these fundamental components of research without the proper techniques of writing. In fact, when I was a freshman in high school during my first real hands-on science research class, a Ph.D. professor came and spoke to us, “Though you may have just started this program, you are probably seeing that these preliminary steps of researching articles and writing an analysis of them are easy. Well…. they’re not. Grammar and concise sentence structure are key components in these papers. Prepare yourself well for them as they will be extremely beneficial to you in your actual work.” She showed us a writing book and claimed confidently that this is meant to help structure your writing better and will make you guys one of the most, successful engineers in the future.”
In relation to the engineer’s thinking, they might, also, have to create a manual on how to operate a machine and/or piece of advanced equipment properly. These instructions should not be taken lightly as any mishap of writing these steps may create confusion in understanding the context. That may lead to severe consequences. Now, the writing doesn’t have to, per-say, be perfect but it still has to convey a clear and concise sense of meaning to the people. A sense of professionalism has to be seen throughout the piece and in order to utilize that kind of approach, an engineer needs to have strong English language skills. For their real career jobs such as: refine oil industries, chemical manufacturer, and others, writing becomes a crucial component, as it may need to convey a justified reasoning (i.e. an experiment or thought process).
In addition to the research/engineering experiences that I have had throughout the years, I have been an official member of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers in which I receive various articles written by professional engineers on some of the beneficial tasks that they perform. Also, since this institute is provided as a club in the Grove School of Engineering, seminars are provided in order to give the young chemical engineers of CCNY an overview of the real research that these people undertake. Abstract papers are given out to us in order to provide a better sense of the understanding of the topics. Hence, this writing, whether it’s for a liberal arts or an engineering purpose, is a continual yet pervasive process that can impact the world in a better way.
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I'm glad to find another engineer who shares the same thought as I do. Even though the idea that engineers need to write is pretty common now, it is still hard to find individuals who find technical writing a crucial process in the engineering career. Your style is ordinary and offer no surprises or quick turns. However, your blog post offers and buttresses your points extremely clearly, and I can easily follow your story. Your writing style demonstrates how a technical writing should be, which I found interesting. It may be or not be that you intended to present the assignment in such a way in order to show what kind of writing engineers do. Anyways, I find the encounter with a Ph. D professor helpful for the readers because the encounter represents the importance of writing in the career field. Even though the process was easily demonstrable without writing, engineers strive for precision and accuracy, and therefore engineers must practice the writing to utilize in the work field in order to achieve the crucial necessities. It could be interesting to point out the not so obvious fact that writing for an engineer isn't just for the assignments in the career. Writing can help them with resumes because it will allow certain individuals to be better than others who do not consider technical writing to be important.