Hm. I would definately concede the fact that an engineering or a computer science major is probably more likely to be a mediocre-to-poor writer than an English major. After all, people tend to major in what they’re good at. This does not mean, however, that all engineering majors can’t write. In the honors college at my university, there is a “Freshman Program” which involves a great deal of writing. I would say that a fair portion of the people in this program are engineering or comp sci majors; they do no better and no worse than the rest of the students.
Be that as it may. . .
I have noticed a startling trend in the way that the English language and writing are viewed by those in a more technical way of mind. Sometimes, writing skills are seen as unimportant by the masses (if not by the higher-ups, who usually understand that effective communication is essential). Also, my dad, who is a pretty damn good electrical engineer, can’t write to save his life.
Also, having peer-read a fair amount of papers by engineering/comp sci majors, I’ve noticed that they tend to have a style which is more. . .arrogant, for lack of a better word. I think that this mode of writing is essential, however, for things such as project proposals, where confidence in one’s own ideas is a must.
Finally, I’ve noticed that at my ranked-first-in-Regional-Universities-Midwest-by-US-News-and-World-Report university there are a number of students in all majors who simply can’t write coherently. Some of the CORE (the-non-honors-program) papers I’ve seen on the computers in the lab downstairs are absolutely horrible.
You just happened to get an engineer who is both arrogant and a horrible writer. He’s lucky to get someone as patient as you. Me, I would’ve let him turn in the paper without any corrections. That’ll learn 'im ;).
Well, that’s hardly a fair comparison. You’re not an English major, so no, you wouldn’t enjoy a paper on, say, “Connections Between Religious Iconography and Gender Roles in the Works of James Joyce,” much the same way most english majors wouldn’t get much out of the design docs for the new 3/28ths Inch Oscillating Griply Sprocket. English grad students write papers for other English grad students (or former grad students, such as their professors), and, just like Engineers, have their own specialised vocabulary to deal with their field, which to people outside the field sounds a lot like gibberish. However, just because you don’t understand the specialised language of a field does not mean that everything written by the people in it is just a bunch of over-educated “puffery.”
As for the Engineer v. the English Language debate in general, I come down on the side of the OP. My dad, by way of example, is a brilliant engineer. He could build a functioning space shuttle out of a bunch of old soup cans and a roll of duct tape. However, it will take him an entire week to compose a three paragraph form letter. I don’t mean a week of “I’ll get to it tomorrow,” I mean a week of sitting in front of the computer, smoking furiously, as he attempts the Herculean task of communicating in the same language he’s been speaking in for the last sixty-five years.
This is not what I am saying at all. I am saying that there is a definite trend towards science students who put a great deal less emphasis into their writing skills, and often dislike writing a great deal. I speak only from what I have seen in my own classes. In truth, I have recieved amazed reactions to my having been an English major. I have had people act as though a gift for writing implies no capability for math. Also, it is commonly accepted that the reverse is somewhat true, for Humanities majors are usually well known for their dislike and lack of skill in advanced mathmatics.
I do not look down on my classmates. I simply concider myself to be an abnormal engineer in todays society, where writting is not emphasized to engineers while in school. I am not the only one. However, stereotypes exist because they are representative to some degree of a portion of the population being stereotyped. Thus if there is a stereotype that engineers can’t write, likely there are many who can’t. If there is a stereotype that Humanities majors can’t do math it is likely that there are many who can’t. NOT ALL OF THEM, just enough to make it common.
I have spoken only that which I have observed in the last four years in college, and have heard from my father, and engineer, who also had difficulty with writing and regularly had my mother, a philosphy major, help improve his papers and presentions.
Actually “gage” is interchangble with “gauge”. In addition, “gage” is also used for specifying cable thickness as well as surgical needles (tounge studs too). Some companies call their instruments “gages” on purpose (I don’t know why, but they do).
As for the OP, I imagine that the guy felt kinda stupid to have someone younger (I’m assuming you’re much younger than him) point out his mistakes.
As an engineer (to be in about 18 days), I can say that at times it does suck to have to explain what you’re saying to someone who doesn’t understand the material (I’m not talking about explaing it to someone who can’t get it, just explaining it in general). And my school requires good grades in English courses in high school, as well as mandatory english courses once you’re here.
Side note: At some schools don’t they consider comp sci (NOT computer engineering) a liberal arts major? If so wouldn’t that put them up there with psych and phys ed majors?
By the way, I seem to be reading the OP differently from most of the respondents; I thought zwei was saying, not that engineers/tech types in general are stupid at writing, but that THIS PARTICULAR engineering student is a conceited moron who is trying to cover up his abysmal ignorance of basic composition skills by pretending that his mistakes are “technical language” that “we ENGINEERS” use “in the lab” but that “the average layperson wouldn’t understand.” :rolleyes: Have I missed the actual point of the rant, or have you?
– Kimstu
(ex-systems engineer, daughter of electronic engineer; neither of us ever had much trouble with that reading/writing stuff)
eh, more of your insight, ** Kimstu **. although i will admit that the engineering majors (on average) have a more difficult time writing papers, but that’s probably why they didn’t want to be english majors.
i’m considered to be somewhat of an oddity at my university. i’m in computer science (which here is most definitely NOT considered ‘liberal arts’! taking up to differential equations in math, several physics classes, chemistry, scores of c++ classes, data bases, assembler, etc. it’s a BITCH), but i’m also majoring in humanities. i’m basically covering opposite ends of the spectrum there. add to that that i’m minoring in math and getting a certificate in technical communications (i only have to take an extra class for either of them), and i’m working on learning german and french (and later on russian) fluently, and you have people who question my sanity (not that i blame them… :D).
i can understand hating writing or english classes. if it’s not your bag, it’s not your bag. but to chalk up the deficiencies of your writing to “you don’t understand it because it’s highly technical and you’re just a layperson” is arrogant at best, and being a fucking prick at worst.
It honestly bothers me. You seem to be a reasonably bright and articulate person (grammar, punctuation and capitalization errors notwithstanding). However, trying to read your posts is a nightmare. Re-read the very first reply here, by Legomancer again. You seem to have missed the fact that he was actually talking about you. For heaven’s sake – we know you know where the shift key is, as you have to use it to make parentheses and exclamation points! Please be courteous to those of us to whom you are directing your writing and properly capitalize where appropriate.
Thank you.
Shayna, whose father is an engineer who not only writes just fine, but has the coolest looking handwriting, to boot!
Aaaargh. If you think engineers are bad at writing papers, you should try to work on group projects with them. I have wasted so much time trying to get a person in the group to say what he thinks clearly so we can put it in the project. It can be an uphill battle. Just for the record, I started as a humanities major but am majoring in physics and civil engineering now. And I can SPELL (which is quite a rarity among engineers I’ve met, and this includes the professors who teach my classes)!
My dad has a degree in chemistry. The nature of his work before he retired also put him in contact with engineers. I had to type up a lot of his notes once, when I was about 16 (long story), and I remember them being, inasmuch as I understood them, precise and unambiguous. (So was his handwriting.) I imagine that was the case with his cow-orkers as well; ambiguity in a nuclear power plant or oil refinery would be fatal.
However. My dad will be 74 this year. When he was working, his cow-orkers were probably his age or thereabouts. That’s a generation that still had to parse sentences. Heck, he even learned Latin! In those days, all subjects were given equal emphasis, and students were still expected to graduate elementary (no middle schools back then), and high school, with adequate knowledge of everything that was taught.
That may be the real problem here. Students are now being encouraged to focus on their “strong points”, on the grounds that they won’t “need” skills that aren’t directly related.
The engineer in the OP reminds me of anyone who is arrogant (or insecure) enough to carry their “credentials” on their sleeve. The continual mentioning of “I’m an engineer” - like that is going to make his paper any better, or is going to excuse his errors. People are like this all over.
My background is in art, and I’ve met other artists who wear their art degree like a badge of “talent”. Yeah, plenty are very accomplished, and the degree was something that was hard-earned, and they are justifiably proud of it.
But others - hoo boy. Don’t get me started. Sometimes, I’ll encounter an artist who mentions their degree, as if this will somehow change the reality that they have no discernable artistic ability. (“But I have an art degree!” “But you still SUCK!”) Well, I’ve never said that. But I’ve felt it a few times.
I related this in another thread a while back: In a Life Drawing class I took years ago, the teacher had to miss a week, and so she “assigned” one of the students to be an informal “teacher” for us for that one session. The reason this particular student was chosen was because she had some sort of degree in art. But the thing was, this student really didn’t draw very well at all. Before that night, I had assumed that she was a “newbie” at Life Drawing. But there she was, yammering away about how she was “in charge”, and about her art degree. My jaw dropped. At least in her case, she was pleasant enough (she pretty much let us do our own thing). But the idea that a person with “newbie” Life Drawing skills was somehow supposed to be “qualified” to teach the rest of us (who possessed far more skill than she did) was weird. The fact that this woman thought she was qualified (when her eyes should have told her that her work was not nearly as advanced as many of the other students she was “in charge” of) was equally weird. I don’t know why the teacher told her to be “in charge”. I guess she was friends with the lady.
I have been an engineer. Before I was an engineer, I was an English major.
The OP is missing the point. In the United States practically no one knows how to write well. (In England, by way of contrast, this is not true.) I currently earn my living, with a high salary, by correcting what are quite basic English mistakes in engineer’s writing. If there was money in it, I could as easily earn my living correcting teachers, professional writers, script writers, etc.
Engineers aren’t at fault so much as low importance we place on being able to communicate accurately and precisely.
In my short and inglorious career teaching introductory-level computing to undergraduates, I ran into a fair number of students who thought that, because they could write code (however badly), they were therefore excused from being able to communicate with their own species. I did my best to disabuse them of this notion.
I also set and marked some of their exam questions, and, though I obviously didn’t mark down computing students for spelling and grammar errors, those errors still adversely affected them - because I had to ask myself, repeatedly, “Does the incoherent rubbish he’s written here mean he doesn’t understand the question, or just that he can’t express the answer clearly?” - and, if the former seemed more likely, mark him down accordingly. (It was, incidentally, “him” in almost all cases… most of the few women on these courses were at least adequate writers.)
A common protest from those concerned was, “But, Steve, you know what I mean”. Oh, yes, my friend, I know what you mean; I, with my master’s degree in linguistics, can eventually translate your mangled prose into something approaching English… this does not make you a fluent communicator.
As other posters have noted, not all engineers are like this… but the technical disciplines do seem to attract a certain type of “efficiency”-minded students, who are determined to learn only what they deem “necessary” to their future career plans. Somebody needs to tell them that clear and accurate communication is, indeed, a “necessary” skill…
I’m no english major, but isn’t it “consider” and “writing”? (Those weren’t the only errors, but they really jumped out since they were in the same sentence)
I’m usually the last one to criticize spelling, but I thought I’d point this out, since you were referring to your own writing abilities as being superior.
I don’t think it’s the fact that someone is an engineer that makes them bad at writing, myself. I’ve seen bad writing in tech fields, management, art majors, English majors, etc. Good grammar seems to have really fallen by the wayside since we now have tools like spellcheck and grammar check.
I’ll agree with partly_warmer that English education in this country is notoriously underemphasized. Although I was fortunate to spend most of my school years in a district that made us do things like [gasp!] diagram sentences (which I actually liked, the perverse bastard that I am).
However, between my sophomore and junior years of high school, I moved from my small town of about ~20k to a city about 10 times the size, and home to a major university. I still remember my first day of AP English. Our teacher had us get in small groups and list the parts of speech. I was the only student in the class that knew that there were exactly 8 and could rattle them all off (noun, pronoun, verb, adverb, adjective, preposition, conjunction, and interjection, if anyone’s interested). And I had to practically bludgeon my group over their individual heads to get them to listen to me.
My stepmother was also a grammar/spelling Nazi, and I’ve picked that tendency up from her. I’m an engineering student, and the horrendous spelling and grammar of many of my friends drives me nuts!
I guess that this is just the flipside of all those students in non-technical fields who wear their inability to do simple arithmetic as a badge of honor.
although i will admit that the engineering majors (on average) have a more difficult time writing papers, but that’s probably why they didn’t want to be english majors. 
