Writing Like An Engineer

A Rhetorical Education

Dorothy A. Winsor

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780805819588
• eBook ISBN: 9781136687754
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Comprised of a study spanning over five years, this text looks at four engineering co-op students as they write at work. Since the contributors have a foot in both worlds -- work and school -- the book should appeal to people who are interested in how students learn to write as well as people who are interested in what writing at work is like. Primarily concerned with whether engineers see their writing as rhetorical or persuasive, the study attempts to describe the students' changing understanding of what it is they do when they write.

Two features of engineering practice that have particular impact on the extent to which engineers recognize persuasion are identified:
* a reverence for data, and
* the hierarchical structure of the organizations in which engineering is most commonly done.
Both of these features discourage an open recognition of persuasion. Finally, the study shows that the four co-op students learned most of what they knew about writing at work by engaging in situated practice in the workplace, rather than by attending formal classes.

Chapter 1

Do Engineers Use Rhetoric?

An automotive engineer is writing a paper for presentation at the national meeting of the Society of Automotive Engineers. He is writing about how his company lessened the amount of pollution produced by one of its engines. In writing the paper, the engineer never looks at the engine directly. Instead, he works from a file of company documents about the engine. His source for knowledge about the engine is not the engine itself but rather the writing that multiple people have done about it (Winsor, 1990b). What is the relationship here between technical artifact, text, the engineer’s knowledge, and the knowledge he wants to create in those who will hear his presentation?

* * *

The chief engineer in the electronics division of a manufacturing firm is talking about the reputation of his company’s products and his own reputation as an expert in his field. He mentions that the company’s public relations department has selected him as the authority to be quoted repeatedly in press releases about electronic products:

The more my name gets in these articles as chief engineer for automotive electronics [at this company], the more viability our products have in the marketplace because I’m an authority all of a sudden on electronics for the trucking industry. And so when you get the top engineer as an authority for electronics in the trucking industry, therefore the products must be of value to the trucking industry, and so it kind of snowballs. It somehow makes the products that [we] produce more legitimate. (Winsor, 1993, p. 190)

What determines how this company’s products are valued? Is it exclusively the objects themselves or are those objects only part of an argument that is also shaped by articles in the trade press and releases from his company’s public relations department?

* * *

The supervisor of an engineering research group deliberately composes his own monthly progress report without looking at the subreports composed by the engineers working under him. His major reason for doing so is that he values the existence of different perspectives on the same activity. He sees divergence between his own opinion and that of subordinates as opportunities to reexamine interpretations of experimental results and thus improve the knowledge the group is generating (Winsor, 1989). If the data this group produces do not determine interpretation, then what, if anything, does? How is the interpretation of any one group member transformed into the knowledge the group eventually agrees is valid? What role does producing the progress report play in this transformation?

HOW BELIEFS ABOUT TECHNOLOGY
LIMIT KNOWLEDGE OF RHETORIC

To anyone interested in rhetoric or technology, moments like these raise questions about the role rhetoric plays in producing technical knowledge. Such moments are particularly striking because our cultural beliefs about technology tend to treat it as object-bound and data-determined. We tend to believe that, in technical practice, objects and data speak for themselves. Indeed, despite the frequency of the kind of event just described, engineers themselves sometimes hold this belief quite tenaciously. The moments I described, however, suggest that rather than speaking for themselves, objects and data need a spokesperson who will stand between us and them to tell us what we see. Moreover, they also suggest that different people can vie for the role of spokesperson for the same object or data because different people will produce different data or interpret the same data differently. In other words, they suggest that in order to be effective, engineers must be skilled users of rhetoric.

Because cultural beliefs about technical knowledge and the actual needs of engineering practice conflict, it is possible that the effectiveness of engineers is diminished and that the professional development of young engineers is needlessly retarded. Such consequences are not only frustrating for engineers but also potentially harmful to society at large because they can result in inferior and even dangerous products.

For example, a reader examining the Rogers Commission report on the explosion of the Challenger is struck by the fact that there was test data showing that the O-ring that eventually failed was highly sensitive to cold. Some engineers at Morton Thiokol, the contractor responsible for the solid rocket boosters, believed that the joint the O-ring sealed was therefore unsafe, but they were unable to convince personnel at NASA or even their own managers of the joint’s weakness in the weeks before the launch. One factor in the failed communication seems to have been that managers at NASA looked at the 24 past shuttle launches as evidence of the joint’s safety, seeing that data as more relevant than the numbers produced in the test lab. In contrast, attending to the test data and not to launch history led the engineers working on the joint to conclude that the joint was faulty. However, they apparently believed that if they simply sent their data to managers, the managers would automatically be convinced by it in the same way the engineers themselves had been (Herndl, Fennell, & Miller, 1991; Winsor, 1988, 1990a). Thus, in this situation, which was complicated in the way reality almost always is, the relevance of different data was unclear, and the meaning of any of the data required interpretation. The existence of data alone was insufficient to create knowledge. People needed to persuade one another of the meaning of the data they had, but they failed to do so partly because they did not seem to know such persuasion was necessary.

The Challenger explosion was, of course, a highly public failure that killed seven people. Most engineers will never be involved in a similar event, but the work of most engineers will affect product quality, company profitability, and worker and consumer safety. In order to do that work well, engineers need to use rhetoric. However, our preconceptions about technology limit our understanding of the role of rhetoric in technical work.

HOW COMMON UNDERSTANDINGS OF RHETORIC
LIMIT KNOWLEDGE OF TECHNICAL ACTIVITY

Although rhetoric is essential to engineering, the common meanings of rhetorical terms make them difficult to apply in any straightforward way to writing such as that described in the opening pages of this chapter. Rhetoric developed historically in the arena of politics and public discourse where the goals are very different than they are in technical work. In this study, problems with traditional meanings of rhetorical terms occurred most frequently with the words persuasion and audience.

A political address is obviously persuasive in a way that a progress report or a test report is not. In traditional terms, these reports would usually be classified as descriptive rather than persuasive. Yet, this study shows that such documents have to use a species of persuasion if they are to be of any use. These documents are intended to accomplish work, and such accomplishment usually means changing something. The thing or state to be changed can range from the way people think to the way a technical product functions, but it is possible to see such inducement of change as a species of persuasion that standard rhetorical theories do not address very well.¹

Engineers tend to prefer saying that they are being convincing rather than persuasive, and the very fact that they choose a different term suggests that, at least for them, persuasion has associations that are not applicable to the relationship between engineers and their readers. Typically, they apply the term persuasion only to manipulative attempts at change, and have trouble seeing its relevance in other kinds of change-inducing action. They themselves often believe that they are simply displaying self-evident data rather than arguing a point. We might quarrel with their understanding and say that more subtle ideas of persuasion are possible, but we do not yet fully understand what those ideas might be like when applied to technical activity because we have not produced sufficient research showing what technical practice is actually like on a day-to-day basis.

Similarly, the term audience often suggests a relationship between speaker or writer and listener or reader that is unidirectional and temporally limited. The speaker or writer originates the text to which the audience is exposed for the first time when the text is delivered. This idea of the writer–audience relationship appears with some frequency even in professional writing textbooks whose authors struggle to explain audience within its limiting framework. This relationship differs sharply from the interactive, recursive relationship that people such as working engineers have with their readers. In professional contexts, writers and readers are coworkers who come together around shared activity, including writing. Indeed, it is that shared activity that defines the audience and the writer’s relationship to it. The goal of writing is usually to motivate, facilitate, or control that activity in ways that are highly complicated and specific to the particular context. Normal uses of persuasion and audience tend to be inadequate in accounting for professional discourse.² Thus, the problem that engineers have in recognizing the rhetorical aspect of their work is exacerbated by limitations in rhetorical terms as they are frequently understood even in professional writing textbooks.

THE SUBJECT OF THIS STUDY

The study described here looks at the interaction between engineering epistemology and engineering practice in the area of rhetoric and particularly in the area of writing. Folk wisdom has it that engineers are bad writers. This is, I think, a belief that deserves some consideration. What does it mean to write badly or well as an engineer? Why should a group of intelligent, educated people write less well than, say, biologists? I would argue that this belief reflects a devaluation of language and particularly of writing in the field of engineering. That is, I think engineers have particular problems in accepting the rhetorical view of knowledge.

This study, then, is a longitudinal multiple case study that probes novice engineers’ understanding of their own rhetorical role as it changed over the course of a 5-year cooperative education program. It examines how four undergraduate engineering students thought about the writing they did as part of their co-op work experience. It attempts to look specifically at the relationship between becoming an engineer and particular uses of and attitudes toward rhetoric. In doing so, it looks not only at what engineers can learn from rhetoric but also at what rhetoricians can learn from the writing practices of engineers.

THE RHETORICALLY CONSTRUCTED
NATURE OF KNOWLEDGE

Engineering is knowledge work. That is, although the goal of engineering may be to produce useful objects, engineers do not construct such objects themselves. Rather they aim to generate knowledge that will allow such objects to be built. One of the underlying assumptions of contemporary rhetoric is that such knowledge generation is a rhetorical act. The word rhetorical has a wide variety of meanings, but I use it here to mean persuasive work is part of the activity and to assert that knowledge is formed in interpersonal negotiation over interpretations of evidence rather than simply in the close individual examination of an unambiguous reality.

In the past two decades, we have altered our notion of the extent to which knowledge in all areas depends on rhetoric. In 1969, Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca argued that rhetoric is used only in some areas because in them knowledge is uncertain. They claimed that “no one deliberates where the solution is necessary or argues against what is self-evident. The domain of argumentation is that of the credible, the plausible, the probable” (p. 1). They named science as their prime example of a nonrhetorical field. Postmodern thinking, however, has extended the realm of uncertainty to just about every kind of human activity, including science and technology. Most rhetoric scholars do not believe in either the existence of self-evident facts or the ability of text to serve as a transparent window on the world. Rather they argue that, like our technical objects, our understanding of the world is always a humanly created artifact that people must persuade one another to accept.

Moreover, one does not use rhetoric only when or because others are being irrational. One uses it because by definition knowledge is something held in common. If I am the only person who “knows” something and cannot convince others, then what I think doesn’t count as knowledge, at least for the time being. Whatever I “know” has not been made available for human use. Indeed, science and technology value replication precisely because it is a field-specific methodological recognition of the communal nature of knowledge. In order for a claim to be accepted as scientific knowledge, people must see the same natural event in the same way.

Rhetoric would say that this repetitiveness is not simply a “natural” occurrence, that it originates not only in the consistency of nature but also in a consistent vision that people have learned to share. Although nature may be consistent, nothing in it forces people to categorize it, account for it, or even perceive it as they do.

To a large extent, we account as we do for the part of the world that is our professional jurisdiction because we have been persuaded to do so. If such persuasion occurred in school, we call it being taught. Once we have become experts in a field, we tend to forget how hard it once was to look at a machine and see its underlying structure; to look at a math problem and know what kind of problem it is; to look at a test result and immediately see what is relevant and what is probably the result of faulty instrumentation. Our common disciplinary vision feels natural to us and we classify all other visions simply as “error.”

In his insightful book on the nature of replication, Collins (1985) examined the extent to which this common vision is a cultural achievement. He viewed it as something to which people are socialized and of which they are often not even aware. That is, he said it is largely a form of tacit knowledge. Contemporary rhetorical theory implies that a common vision of reality is also a rhetorical achievement because knowledge of the world is not something that is once achieved and then forever remains the same. Reality does not stand still, and people must there...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editor's Introduction
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Do Engineers Use Rhetoric?
• Chapter 2 Socialization Through Writers and Genres
• Chapter 3 Learning to Construct and Interact With an Audience
• Chapter 4 The Textual Negotiation of Corporate “Reality”
• Chapter 5 Writing Like an Engineer
• Chapter 6 Conclusion
• Appendix: Request for “Backtalk”
• References
• Author Index
• Subject Index