“Engineers can’t write.“
-Me, originally circa 2015
Did I catch your attention? Good, because this is a long winded, ranty anecdote about how I came to that conclusion, and how it’s only been reinforced with time, collaborative work, and an unintentionally funny and motivating excerpt from a textbook. Ready to read a rant? Read on.
I am not an engineer.
Even after being raised by one and meeting a bunch of his very cool and interesting friends, and even while having a college known for its engineering programs in town, I decided against it.
And through my too-long time spent in that college getting a background in Technical Communication, I’ve never regretted the decision I’ve made to not be an engineer. Not to disparage colleagues in that field, but my upbringing left me with some lingering opinions, mostly that engineers love dealing with other engineers as much as possible, and that they prefer to speak and work in a very English-adjacent jargon that few outside their fields could understand.
Student me saw that habit as a challenge; translate engineering jargon back into English so that more than just engineering personnel know what’s going on at any given time. Student me also noticed an issue with that, though. If any of the dozen or so writing-heavy courses I needed to take had a critical mass of engineering students, the class would be significantly easier than ones without. Turns out future engineers are only interested in structure if it involves wiring diagrams or bridge supports. Neither of these, sadly, are sentences, so a lot of very simple (high school or lower) grammatical, structural, and even spelling errors were made. Most of the group projects, papers I peer-reviewed, and one particularly egregious editing project led me to an adage that I stand by to this day:
[With very few exceptions,] Engineers can’t write.
It was only a short while later that I learned this has been an ongoing problem for a century, and that the origins of a huge part of my field lie in engineers’ reluctance to craft a decent sentence.
Rhetorical Theory remains one of my favorite classes I’ve ever taken. Instead of just making sure the classics (The Sophists, Aristotle, Plato, et al) were hammered into us and that we could discuss Dissoi Logoi on a whim, the professor deftly moved us from theory to application in a way that drove the theory home and made it real. I find that in some fields (looking at you again, semiotics), it becomes far too easy to miss the forest for classifying everything about the trees. And though all that classification might actually be up Aristotle’s alley, it’s amazing that we left that Classical wormhole and were able to see how rhetoric affects and effects the populace in today’s world.
Towards the middle of the course, we spent a couple of weeks reading and applying rhetorical ideas and tropes to various works in Johndan Johnson-Eilola and Stuart A. Selber’s excellent Central Works in Technical Communication. But well before we got to the ethics of expediency (a definite future post), we read the introductory pages about the history of technical writing. Pages 5-10 remain dog-eared in my copy of the text for the sweet vindication they offered me as a student bewildered by bad engineering writing habits. Allow me to pull a choice quote:
“The Engineering Record spoke for many practicing engineers when it charged that “It is impossible, without giving offense to college authorities, to express one’s self adequately on the English productions of the engineering students… Most of them can be described only by the word ‘wretched.'”
Central Works in Technical Communication, pp. 5-6
There a few other great quotes in those few pages I mentioned, but that one stuck with me. And as the historical account continues, the engineers’ disgust with writing helped lead to the formation of technical writing as a field. That history was vindicating to me as a technical communicator in a school where it often felt like non-engineering students were second-class citizens. Technically, they’d become much better writers than their predecessors, who were content with relative illiteracy (p. 5) and calling their English teachers “budding pinkos.” (p. 10). But in their stubbornness, they’d done a favor to the writing community, allowing the technical writing field to form and grow, something it’s done consistently for decades.
The day we read that piece was the day that I knew I made the right choice. It might be mean-spirited that quotes like those above gave me determination to be a better technical communicator, but I’d argue that it’s naïve to believe that spite can’t be as great a motivator as more positive emotions.
The lesson I learned from this is both cynical and pragmatic; “One person’s ignorance is another’s paycheck.” Does it bother me that writing classes with engineers in them were markedly easier than ones without? Absolutely. But I like writing and editing, and I like the idea of getting paid for them, so when someone needs something done to a certain specification, even if they should definitely know how to do it, I’m willing to not be bothered for a nominal fee.
Next time: I write something shorter, and try to settle on a consistent day to post here. Until then.
PS: In case you are my Rhetorical Theory professor reading this, feel free to come back for other complimentary posts in the future. A lot of things that stuck with me throughout my long tenure as a student come from your classes, and I’m definitely going to have more anecdotes. Also, if you have a list of books you’d recommend to recent graduates, hit me up?
PPS: In case you were wondering, to count engineering students where I studied, you simply count the number of baseball caps and Carhartt jackets in the room. If caps + jackets >= 10, you can reasonably assume the class is going to feature some pretty remedial grammar worksheets.