Reading Material 1a

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READING AND WRITING FOR ENGINEERINGSTUDENTSCharlene M. Spretnak

Since numerous engineering colleges are currently creating or expanding programs in technical communication, manyuniversities are debating whether the program should be placedin the English department or in the college of engineering itself.In arguing for the latter option, a number of technical writingteachers have published the opinion that our courses aremarkedly different from general courses on expository prosewhich are taught in English departments. This is true; there areessential points of departure. However, one difference that isfrequently cited is the requiring of a good deal of reading duringa writing course. This approach is generally associated withEnglish departments, having no relevance to the way technic lwriting is properly taught. In this paper, I shall present two reasons for including numerous reading assignments when teaching technical writing to engineering students, and I shall suggestmethods by which to do so.

The Value of Reading Skills in an Engineering CareerIn the spring of 1980, I conducted a survey of 1000 engineering alumni from the U. C. Berkeley classes of 1948through 1978 titled Technical Communication and the Professional Engineering. l I found that, on the average, engineersspend twenty-five percent of their job-related time writing,twenty-three percent reading technical and business material,eleven percent supervising the writing of others, and sevenpercent giving oral presentations that is, more than half of anengineer's work is comprised of communication tasks. Once anengineer progresses beyond entry level, he or she spends a gooddeal of time reading technical material, analyzing it, andresponding to it. According to the Berekeley alumni survey,

JOURNAL OF ADVANCED COMPOSITION, Volume IV 1983). Copyright1987.


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supervisors spend an average of ten percent o their timecritiquing the writing of others, but this amount nearly doubles,i.e., nineteen percent, when engineers move into positions suchas project head, department head, or division director. Criticalreading skills, then, may be seen as a requisite for suchadvancement. Moreover, engineers at all levels must be able toassimilate written technical information efficiently. One respondent to the survey wrote, "Develop reading skills Toomany young engineers read (study) for details and miss the overall view."

Reading as an Aid to Learning Writing SkillsIn addition to the fact that critical reading skills enhanceadvancement in an engineering career, there is a pedagogic rea

son for assigning reading: Readers write better. In an experiment involving two groups of high school students inMassachusetts, the group that read regularly but had few writingassignments wrote better at the end of the year than did thegroup that wrote a lot but had no reading assignments.2 Oneclass in each of the four grade levels, the "writing" class, wrotethe equivalent of a theme per week, which was rigorouslycorrected by the teacher and revised or rewritten by the student.The "reading" class in each grade wrote a theme only everythree weeks and spent one period each week reading books theyhad selected. Writing skill was evaluated at the beginning andend of the academic year via an objective test of spelling, diction,style, mechanics, etc. (the STEP Writing Text, Form 2A and then2B, designed by the Educational Testing Service), plus a composition test evaluated by three experienced gradets of the ETS English Achievement Test.

t the end of the year, the average amount of improvement among students in the reading classes was nearly twicethat of students in the writing classes, as measured by the STEPWriting Test: The readers improved by +6.5 points, the writersby +3.5. (The total number of points in the test is 60 . The composition tests were graded in three areas with a range of ninepossible grades (1-9). In content and organization, the averageamount of improvement among the readers was more than oneand-a-half times that of the writers, i e., +.7 of a grade comparedto +.45. In mechanics, the average amount of improvementamong the readers was more than three times as great as that of


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the writers, L e., .38 of a grade compared to .11. In diction andrhetoric, the average amount of improvement among the readers was ten times that of the writers, L e., +.7 of a grade compared to +.07. A pilot study two years earlier in that high schoolhad shown similar results, although they were not monitored asthoroughly as in the larger experiment.These findings support the dictum that one must absorbexamples of good styles while learning to write well-or moresimply, Writers read. Numerous respondents to theBerekeley alumni survey shared this opinion, e. g., If one doesnot read, it is difficult to write well, and Reading technicalpapers is a very helpful aid in learning to communicate. Inaddition, cross-tabulation of the data from that survey showed apositive correlation between writing skills and the amount oftime engineers spend in leisure reading. What is surprising isthat research on this important correlation has been so scarce.Studies on ww reading aids a writing student's progress wouldbe worthwhile. From the Heys study, we can assume that thebrain somehow assimilates examples of economical prose,extensive vocabulary, and effective ordering which the readingof good writing provides. Later, the writing student seems todraw creatively from his or her data bank of rhetoricalpossibilities.

Incorporahon Reading Assignments into a TechnicalWriting Course for Engineering StudentsOne might suppose that the reading of engineering textbooks would have a beneficial effect, but many students havetold me they develop a habit of scanning the words for thefacts, as if the real information were floating in a sort of prose

pudding which is of secondary importance. Never having paidmuch attention to expository prose, they have difficulty producing it. Hence the discussion of every model of a genre oftechnical writing, e.g., feasibility study, research report, grantproposal, that is distributed to the class should include a basicrhetorical analysis, Le., attention to the means by which theauthor introduces and develops the thesis. Teachers should alsodiscuss the role of diction in the models; when students see thatword choice is both efficient and strategic, they begin to developan interest in the precision of language. Nurturing this attitudeis important since engineering students often enter the course


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with a low regard for prose as being more arbitrary, vague, andimprecise than mathematics.Because the models represent genres that most of thestudents will eventually be critiquing in a supervisory capacity,the rhetorical analyses in class should include the identificationof implicit assumptions that often inform purely objectivetechnological conclusions. The selection of questions beingaddressed is as important as the answers themselves.Although the core of a technical writing course should benumerous writing assignments, many of them can be designedto incorporate the reading of technical literature, such as thewell edited articles in journals published by several of the profes-sional engineering societies. In addition to academic and tradejournals, most engineering college libraries contain thousandsof engineering studies and reports. One can require students toread and refer to a certain number of these technical works in aformal technical report, the major project in the course. Inpracticing an outline and then several abstracts during the earlypart of the course, students can go to the library and select atechnical article of their choice which can later be applied asone of the research sources required for the formal report.To ensure that students learn to read closely, not merelyscan, the teacher can require them to write a rhetorical critiqueof an article, essay, or brief report on an area of engineering.They soon develop an awareness of the distinguishing featuresof good or bad writing; this is not to say that they can alwaysproduce good writing on their own, but that they have learnedwhat to look for. Such discriminatory powers build thestudent's confidence. In practicising revising, for instance,critical reading is the essential first step.In summary, reading helps anyone learn to write, andanalytical reading prepares engineering students for supervisorytasks, which involve critiquing. These are two reasons for incor-porating reading exercises into a course on technical communica-tion. They outweigh by far the objections to including readingthat are based on a desire to distance technical writing coursesfrom regular composition courses. There are numerous dif-ferences between the two types of courses, but every writing stu-dent needs to read. In fact, developing the ability to perceivestyle as well as content introduces engineering students to thepleasure of reading. To continue improving their languageskills, students should be encouraged to keep reading after com-pletion of ,the writing course; they generally appreciate a list of


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suggested books and magazines. In fact when I encounterformer students they proudly tell me what they are currentlyreading-or from a distance, they reach into their backpacks andwave The John McPhee Reader or The Existential Pleasures ofEngineering or whatever it may be. At such moments, I feel thesatisfaction of success: As long as those engineers maintain thehabit of reading, I know their writing skills will continue toevolve.University ofCaliforniaBerkeley, California

NOTES

1See A Survey of the Frequency and Importance of Technical Communication n an Engineering Career, The Technical Writing Teacher VoL 9 No. 3,Spring 1982.2Frank Heys, Jr., ''The Theme-a-Week Assumption: A Report of anExperiment, The English Journal Vol. U No.5 May 1962, pp. 320-322. I amgrateful to Dr. James R Gray, Director of the Bay Area Writing Project, Schoolof Education,U C. Berkeley, for bringing this research to my attention.

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