Writing at Tech

See what Tech science and engineering faculty say about the importance of writing in their courses:

"...Two things I see very commonly are choppiness and paragraph structure. It is often necessary to add lots of transition words, like therefore, yet, however, on the other hand, in contrast, to make the sentence flow better and to let the reader know the relation between the thoughts in the sentences. Many of them write in jumbled paragraphs and it is very hard to extract the important points. Part of this is poor science in which they present their interpretation before giving the data. This happens on all scales in the papers. Very often I have to re-write several example paragraphs and then have the student go through the paper paragraph by paragraph and try to get each one to follow a logical progression."

Andrew Campbell, Earth and Environmental Science

"Specifically, for term papers (juniors and seniors): they don't seem to know how to organize the work. I ask for the standard headings: Abstract, Introduction, Objective, Procedure, Results, Discussion, Conclusions, References, Appendix. They include these headings, but the abstract has [the information of the] introduction, [and] the introduction has results. Often there is no introduction so the reader is left wondering what the paper is about."

To a lesser extent, they have spelling problems with pairs like:

principle, principal
their, there
its, it's (almost all students us "it's" for both cases)
complement, compliment
than, then

Alan R. Miller

"The main problems I see are in focus and in having arguments presented logically. Very often students have difficulty in separating the important points from trivial or side issues. Students also have difficulty with agreement in tenses and related areas. While that is something I expect from foreign students, it is not something that should occur with native English speakers."

Dr. Allan Gutjahr

"Students do not seem to appreciate the importance of writing. In and of itself, writing well will not make one a successful scientist or engineer; however, writing poorly almost assures a mediocre career. Indeed, once 'on the job,' a large fraction of time is spent writing. There are proposals, papers, and progress reports, and one lives or dies by how well these are written.

As far as I can tell, the writing process, more or less, is as follows: they are asked to write a paper on a particular topic; they find a book on that topic; they 'lift' a sentence from every paragraph or so in the relevant section of the book; these sentences are loosely grouped into paragraphs; introductory and concluding paragraphs are written (sometimes); cover sheet is attached; it's all done.

Aside from the plagiarism involved, such an approach shows a lack of understanding of the writing process. One's ideas should evolve while the paper is being written. Indeed, few students view writing as a tool which can aid the thought process. Mainly, I assume, because writing, like thinking, is hard work. It takes me between 50 and 100 man-hours to prepare a, say, 10 page paper for submission to a journal. This is, of course, just the writing, not the research. Most of that time is spent re-reading the paper, re-expressing my thoughts more clearly, adding to what I have already written, re-thinking what I have written, and changing what I have written. In other words, revising. My peers assure me that 100 hours is not excessive.

My writing has improved significantly since I have been at Tech, and it may be that no one really learns to write well until their professional reputation is on the line. Be that as it may, I believe that students need to understand how a paper should be written so that they have a framework to build upon when they discover that writing really is important."

John McCoy, Materials

"As an engineer, we are concerned about engineering technical writing, [such as] lab reports, proposals, engineering reports."

My pet peeves about student writing are:

The persistent use of 1st person that is definitely not acceptable in engineering technical writing. As "vogue" as it may be in some disciplines to use 1st person, engineering professions find it quite offensive.

Organization: putting the horse before the cart and not behind it

On the paragraph level - Introducing a thought/concept/subject/table/figure up-front, at the beginning of a paragraph, then discuss it (justification, rationale, explanation) rather than opening a paragraph with an "argument" and ending with "this is apparent from the data shown in Figure 5." [That should be the] last sentence in a paragraph!

On a report level - Students must learn to organize. The obvious in any report [is]:

What you did/what was done
Why you did it/purpose
Scope of work
How you did it (only for scientific investigations)
What are the results (recommendations, conclusions)?

Referencing is weak

We do not use footnotes in engineering

Cathy Aimone, Dept. Chair, Mineral and Environmental Engineering