summary report
Abdul1995
WritingforEngineers.pptEffective Communication Skills for Engineers
April 1, 2016
Presenter: Beth Richards
Director, 1st and 2nd Year Writing
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Overview
- Why Do Engineers
- Write?
- Speak?
- Essential Concepts: Audience and Purpose
- Also Essential: Effective Delivery
- Format/design (for writing)
- Tone, gestures, etc. (for speaking)
- Ways to Build Your Skills
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Question #1
True or False: You can survive in today’s workplace with great technical skills (no need for writing or teamwork skills)
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Answer: False
- In today’s job market, no.
- And you certainly won’t thrive without communication and teamwork skills.
- Who gets promoted?
- People with required technical skills
- People who understand relationship between design and cost
- People who communicate well, especially with non-engineers (and with team members)
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One Expert Says
“A lot of good ideas never see the light of day because the engineers who have them are unable to communicate their ideas.”
--John Rossiter, chemical engineer, consultant
Source: cagle.com
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Source: cagle.com
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Another Expert Says…
“Engineers may spend as much as 60% of their working hours writing to diverse audiences to achieve a variety of purposes.”
Source: Texas A&M engineering handbook
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Source: Texas A&M engineering handbook
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Why Do Engineers Write? Reason #1
- To inform—share data with engineers and non-engineers
- Ideas!
- Documentation of processes (design, testing)
- Technical specifications
- Analysis of problem or issue
- Progress reports
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Why Do Engineers Write? Reason #2
- To persuade (ask for action)
- Proposals/grants
- Feasibility reports
- Analytical reports (with conclusions)
- Cost-benefit analysis (this will pay for itself)
- Best-practices analysis (best solution is…)
- Design analysis (this design will work because…)
- White paper (argues a specific position or solution to a problem)
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Information + Persuasion
- Informative: Explaining a design concept
- Persuasive: Convincing decision maker that the concept is worth developing ($$)
- Everything you write tells the reader something about you:
- Detail oriented
- Precise
- Understand more than just data/technical information
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Why Do Engineers Write?
Reason #3
- To cover their…liabilities
- Documentation of work processes, costs, design testing, etc.
- Writing is a record of your informed, ethical, engineering decisions
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Ask Yourself…
Why was Volkswagen trying to destroy all those emails and test documents?
Source: Infographicsworld.com
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Source: Infographicsworld.com
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So How to Build Writing That Works?
- It’s not magic!
- Learn some basic concepts
- Use some useful formats
- Write, revise, repeat
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Essential Concept 1: Audience
- The target of your writing or presentation
- Effective writers learn everything they can about the audience:
- Knowledge level/specialization
- Position in organization
- Essential demographics (male, female, age)
- Essential psychographics (attitudes, biases)
- Context in which the audience will receive the information
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Who Is the Audience?
65yo male patient admitted to ED 1330. Physical exam: cyanosis, bilateral lower extrem edema. Auscultation revealed tachycardia + crepitations. EKG 1400 revealed short Q waves. Cardiac enzymes neg. DX: CHF. Rx: Lasix 40mg/dL IV, 5mg/dL bolus, 24 hr admit.
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Technical Language Is Great
- As long as everyone reading it has the expertise to understand
- Reality: Most engineers work in a “mixed” environment of engineering experts and experts in other fields (finance, management, logistics, etc.)
- Engineers must adapt their specialized language to be understood
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Audience, continued
- Audience analysis takes up-front time, but it yields excellent results
- Makes writing more accurate
- Eliminates overwriting and underwriting
- Makes writing process more efficient
- Key: Target audience, then use vocabulary, amount of info., format, etc. to adapt material specifically for that audience
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Back to This Poor Guy…
How can you make this information accessible to a non-expert?
65yo male patient admitted to ED 1330. Physical exam: cyanosis, bilateral lower extrem edema. Auscultation revealed tachycardia + crepitations. EKG 1400 revealed short Q waves. Cardiac enzymes neg. Dx: CHF. Rx: Lasix 40mg/dL IV, 5mg/dL bolus, 24 hr admit.
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CHF Stands for…
- Congestive heart failure or critical head fracture to medical people
- Swiss franc to bankers
- Critical heat flux to electronics experts
- Children’s Hospital Foundation to philanthropists
- Custom home furnishings to furniture retailers
- Crazed Heidi Fangirl to…???
Source: Infographicsworld.com
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Source: Infographicsworld.com
Essential Concept 2: Purpose
- Effective writing has a reason for being written
- Ask yourself: what purpose do I want this document to achieve?
- Show my instructor that I understand the course concepts
- Persuade a funder that the best course of action is giving me money for my new design
- Quickly and effectively inform my supervisor of a delay in a project deadline
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Ways to “Check” Your Purpose—Ask Yourself:
- What do I want reader to do after they’ve read my document?
- Is that stated clearly early in the document?
- Do I have so much information that my reader might be confused about what to do next?
- Useful guiding formula: In this document I will do x so that my reader will do y.
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You May Or May Not Be Explicit
- In this analysis I will show the benefits of modifying the prototype design so that my supervisor will approve continued testing
- In this trip report I will explain the conference workshops I attended, what I learned, and how they will help me do my job better, so that my supervisor will agree to pay for another conference
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Essential Concept 3: Design
- Audiences/readers have expectations about how documents look—their design
- Writer’s job: meet those expectations
- Formal report: front and back matter, report body, appendices, graphics
- Informal report: block paragraphs, headings, memo or email
- Presentation: PowerPoint (with handouts, without handouts, with or without graphics, video, etc.)
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Yes, Make It Visually Appealing
You wouldn’t like to read a document like this that goes on and on and on endlessly about stuff you really don’t understand because after a while such a document gets incredibly boring and your mind begins to drift and then you realize that you’ve run your eyes over four or five pages but you haven’t remembered anything and so you go back and read it again and you fall asleep and so you read it again and try to concentrate but there are no breaks in the page and no place for your eyes to rest and you just give up.
Right?
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Visual Appeal Means
- Enough white space to “rest” the eyes
- Headings to break up text, organize, orient
- Graphics to convey concepts or data that are laborious to convey in words
- Use of standard typeface—and big enough to read from back of room
- Avoiding distracting elements (such as graphics that don’t add meaning or typefaces like this).
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Factoid
Source: Google Images
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Source: Google Images
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Design for Presentations
- Two parts:
- Presentation software (PowerPoint, Prezi) is clear and readable
- Speaker traits (eye contact, gestures, voice pace and tone) add to content
- Both should work together to make you look
- Smart
- Focused
- Professional
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What About Grammar and Style?
- Correct grammar helps readers navigate your writing quickly and easily
- Incorrect grammar distracts—and may make readers conclude that you’re (a) careless or (b) not very bright
- Style: think functional rather than literary
- Shorter sentences—strong subjects and verbs
- Concrete rather than abstract terms
- Straightforward, no nonsense, no fluff
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Which Is Correct?
The average executive, vice-president level, has an attention span of:
- 5 minutes
- 1 minute
- 25 seconds
- 3 minutes
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The Writer’s Task
- Understand what the audience needs or wants (including time constraints)
- Determine the writer’s purpose for writing this document (or making this presentation)
- Use the format that the audience expects
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Ways to Build Your Skills
- Learn concepts (audience, purpose, etc.) so that you write with purpose rather than accidentally
- Practice as many types of writing as you can (emails are writing!)
- Ask for and pay attention to feedback
- Practice some more
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Questions? Comments?
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Source: gettimelyblog.com
Source: gettimelyblog.com
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