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Transferring Fundamental Communication Skills to Engineering
40 Plays4 months ago
In the first episode of Season Two of Communication Mechanics, Dr. Jill Fennell is joined by Dr. Andy Frazee, Director of Writing and Communication in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. Lending his expertise in the first year writing sequence of English 1101 and 1102, he offers strategies and connections between required communications courses and technical courses for early career engineering students.
Show Notes and Timestamps:
- Introduction to Topic and Guest: 00:56
- Learning transferring skills in English 1101 and 1102: 2:37
- Understanding Audience, Purpose, and Genre: 6:08
- How Decision and Design courses in ME are similar to 1101 and 1102: 11:34
- ME 1670 and English 1101/2 and maximizing transfer between the two: 14:04
- Importance of collaboration and intersection between collaboration and communication: 16:53
- Transferable concepts and the importance of process: 20:09
- Scaffolding design reports and process work in ME and English: 24:01
- Revision skills and internalizing process: 26:05
- Transferring basic writing skills from 1101/2 to ME 1670: 33:13
- Communication decisions and the power of intentional decision making in your communication: 40:34
- Final advice on transfer, intentionality, and communication decisions: 43:56
A transcript of the episode is available here.
Episode Edited by Lee Hibbard
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to Engineering Communication
00:00:10
Speaker
Welcome back to Communication Mechanics, a podcast for engineers, where we explore the science and art of communication and engineering. Last season, we covered general topics that helped us examine why strong communication matters for engineers. This season, we're taking a deeper dive into practical topics such as writing best practices, visual communication blind spots, code commenting, and more, all tailored to help you navigate the unique challenges of engineering communication.
00:00:40
Speaker
Whether you're tuning in for the first time or returning for another season, we're excited to have you with us.
The Role of Early Education in Engineering Communication
00:00:55
Speaker
Welcome to today's episode. As engineers, we often focus on the technical skills that will drive our careers forward. But there's a hidden power in the writing skills that many of us develop in the early stages of our education, specifically in the first year required English courses. At Georgia Tech, that's English 1101 and 1102.
00:01:16
Speaker
Whether you're drafting a technical report, preparing a presentation, or communicating with your team, strong writing and communication skills are essential for engineers. Let's dive in.
Interview with Dr. Andy Frazee on Communication Skills
00:01:27
Speaker
Joining us is Dr. Andy Frazee, Director of the Writing and Communication Program at Georgia Tech, who will help us understand how those foundational skills should carry over into technical fields.
00:01:40
Speaker
Andy oversees courses in first-year composition, business communication, and technical communication, and supervises the teaching, research, service, and professional development of the Marion L. Britton Postdoctoral Fellows and the Writing and Communication Program Lectures. Hi Andy. Hi Jill, thanks for having me.
00:01:58
Speaker
Thank you so much for coming. I was really hoping that this episode could be a nice resource for students as they start bridging from their required first year courses into the mechanical engineering curriculum.
00:02:12
Speaker
Well, and I think this is a really important concept instead of strategies to think about because that's exactly what we want to happen, right? Taking the the sort of foundational skills and and strategies that people learn in English 11.01 or 11.02 and building on that in other courses and actually even outside of Georgia Tech and your professional lives or personal lives. Yeah, exactly.
00:02:37
Speaker
English 1101 and 1102 are required courses for all students at GT, including engineers. How do you think students can get the most out of these classes, beyond just checking off the requirements?
00:02:49
Speaker
Well, I think there's a few things. One is realizing, and this podcast will help do a little bit of that, is realizing how important it is to that that the skills and things that you're learning really are meant to be transferable into other situations and built upon in your other classes and in your professional life. And so realizing that is important.
00:03:11
Speaker
And so too, I think it's important to really think about what it is you're learning and make those connections. So part of what we have the classes set up to do is to help do that through reflection.
Applying Communication Strategies in New Contexts
00:03:25
Speaker
So you know everybody in those classes has the end of the semester portfolio in which they reflect on what they've learned over the course of the semester and start thinking about that bridge to other courses, other places where they might apply those things.
00:03:40
Speaker
And so really taking that into account, really thinking through those things, really seeing those things as valuable because they are. So you'll be learning about rhetoric and process and multimodality, all these sort of concepts and strategies that are bigger than the specific assignments that you might be doing. So you might be doing a podcast right in English 1101 or 1102, and that might be fun and you might have a lot of fun doing it, but that also might be the only podcast you ever make in your life, right? But the things that you learn about doing that, so things like project management and planning it out and working with other people and thinking about your oral communication and how you might edit it, all of those things get can go into other kinds of situations that you find yourself when you need to communicate. So the same kind of thing can happen whenever you find any new situation where you have to speak or even some things where you have to create something that's nothing
Understanding Audience, Purpose, and Genre
00:04:35
Speaker
like a podcast. So it's those kinds of strategies that can be really helpful in other situations. Okay, so just because that might be the only podcast you ever create, you'll probably make similar decisions in the creation and editing of this final product that you would for other communication products.
00:04:52
Speaker
Exactly. And so, you know, over the course of our lives, we're going to come into, I don't know how many, know it seems like it would be millions, right? like Certainly thousands of different communication situations. We probably come into hundreds of them just every day, right? This is a new one for me, right? um I guess I've done some interviews before, but not exactly like this. And so I have to think about what's the rhetorical situation. So who's the audience? And we talked about that earlier. Right. um You know, what's my purpose? What is the kind of genre of the podcast, and the genre meaning the kind of things that define it. What are the things that podcasts tend to do? And so those sort of sets of questions, who is my audience? What is my purpose? What sort of contextual issues do I need to be aware of? What is the genre? We can apply those to any particular communication situation and that will help us communicate in that situation.
00:05:47
Speaker
And so we're going to often find ourselves up against situations where we don't know exactly what the answer is or it's a new situation. And so you might be doing a technical poster for the first time. You can still ask yourself those questions and those questions can help you get to the point where you can complete that task ably and in a good way.
00:06:07
Speaker
I've been working in the Woodruff School for over a year now and some of the concepts that I would pull out from what you just said that I think are highly relevant to our engineers is understanding who their audience is and really catering information to that audience, understanding what their purpose is and how that purpose relates to the audience. And then also understanding genre. I mean, sometimes you have to teach yourself the genre, which can be really difficult.
00:06:33
Speaker
Well, yeah, and I'm thinking back to my own experience. So, thinking specifically first about genre and then I'll come back to to audience and purpose. Back in the previous century when I was in an undergraduate and then I i got my degree in advertising. I eventually got my PhD in English and that's why i'm where I'm now.
00:06:53
Speaker
But after I graduated with a degree in advertising, I went in to work for a marketing firm. And one of the first things that I did, it was a small marketing firm. It was basically a startup. And so I was doing a lot of different things. And basically, the first thing that my boss told me to do was that we needed to respond to a request for proposals. um Now, of course, he didn't say request for proposals. He said ah RFP. And I didn't have any idea what that was at the time. That would ah potentially make the the The purpose of it was to print signs for, at the time, it was Amico gas stations. Amico hasn't been around for a long time. They became a part of BP, but it was a bunch of of gas stations. So here I am basically my first week on the job.
00:07:36
Speaker
And I'm having to think through, one, what is an RFP, which I've eventually figured out. And then how do I respond to that? So the proposal genre was something completely new to me. So in that process, I had to think through, well, how do I figure out what this is? And so I asked for help. I looked for things. It's a lot easier now than it was in the late 90s to find things online and so
Real-world Communication Challenges and Solutions
00:07:56
Speaker
forth. But I had to get a lot of help to figure out exactly what it needed to look like.
00:08:00
Speaker
And your students and engineers and all Georgia Tech students are going to be coming into situations in the workplace and in other places where they're going to be asked to communicate in particular ways that are not going to be obvious, right? And they're certainly not going to be, you know, write me an academic essay, right?
00:08:18
Speaker
And so what we try to teach in our classes is, again, those those kind of questions, like what is the genre? So i like at least knowing, I need to know what the genre is. I need to know what are the particular moves and kinds of content and tone that is appropriate for this particular thing. Because as we surely know, that the the proposal that I ended up creating is much different from an academic essay, is much different from a podcast. right And so that's why it's important to ask ourselves those questions. And it doesnt you don't always necessarily get the answer to the question right away. I still had to do some work. like But at least I knew what the question was. What is the proposal? right like What are the things I need to do for the proposal? And that way, for example, my co-workers and colleagues were able to to help me figure that out. right
00:09:06
Speaker
Thinking about audience, all of this is, of course, related. All of this is part of the rhetorical situation. But thinking particularly about audience and purpose, I'm thinking back prior to my work doing that proposal, I took a business and technical writing class as an undergraduate at the University of Illinois.
00:09:23
Speaker
and I have said for a long time and I still will say even though I learned a lot of things in college probably the most important thing I learned and I i sort of remember the point when I learned it was you need to think about your audience when you're creating your whatever it is you're creating your text your communication and that was a big deal that particular class really sort of focused me on that idea, thinking about the people listening to this podcast, thinking about the people who are going to receive that proposal, thinking about what their expectations are, what information they need to make a decision, all of these different things. And it took me a while in that class to to figure that out because it wasn't obvious, right? And we can say we can say this over and over again. and think about your audience, think about your audience, and maybe you provide ways to to do that. But until you start practicing it, it's it's not it's not clear, right? it's
Collaboration and Composition in Professional Settings
00:10:17
Speaker
not And it's not- It's a little abstract. Yeah, it's a little abstract. and so And that's one thing that we hope will happen in in in our classes is that students get some practice thinking about different audiences and seeing how different audiences might respond to a particular kind of writing or a particular piece of communication.
00:10:38
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that transfers really well to what we're trying to do with the web communication program over here in the Woodruff School because we are really trying to get our engineers to think about how to create usable information via communication. And so that usability all comes down to who's going to be the one wanting to do something with this information? Who's going to be your reader?
00:10:59
Speaker
Well, yeah, absolutely. And I love the concept of usability in sort of, you know, usability testing with products or with interfaces or whatever. And it's the same sort of thing with writing or with your pieces of communication. And so you can think that you can approach this as an engineer, right? Thinking about, well, who's the user of this?
00:11:16
Speaker
Yeah. Product, the product being the podcast or the proposal or whatever, and what do they need to know in order to use it, right? And so it's a pretty well aligned with the same kind of thing as, as creating a product or creating a process or, or, you know, from an engineering point of view.
00:11:33
Speaker
One of the things I found really fascinating whenever I became a part of the Woodruff School is in what we call ME 2110. It's a called a creative decisions and design course. And I think of that as very similar to a sort of English 101.
00:11:49
Speaker
because they have to use a tool called a specification sheet where they fill in the customer's requirements, but also the constraints, the budget, the things that, well, it's a tool that allows them to just figure out what kinds of decisions are possible, what kinds of decisions aren't possible, and then to start ranking those decisions. And I see that really similar to like filling in a rhetorical triangle, especially with the context part.
00:12:16
Speaker
And the the genre, like, okay, what kind of decisions does this genre allow me to make? Who's gonna be using my information? How am I gonna rank what I actually want to accomplish in this piece of communication to satisfy the client?
00:12:30
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, and I think as you were talking about the specs, I was thinking too of the issue of scope, right? And sometimes genres have different levels of scope. So like you can have a proposal that's many, many pages long and you can have a proposal that's a couple of pages long. And so knowing what the details are of that are really important because you don't want to give a one hundred page proposal when you only need to give a three page for proposal.
00:12:53
Speaker
Yeah, I mean pages four through 100 probably they aren't getting read. Right. Well, yeah, exactly. It's the same kind of thing when we're talking about the kind of transferable skills and strategies that we're trying to learn in English 1101, 1102 is that it is a form, I think, of of sort of project management that's also so adaptable to other situations or at least connected to other situations like the one you're talking about is what is the scope of this project, right? How much time do I have to complete this project?
00:13:22
Speaker
So, for example, perhaps you're assigned to create well a podcast or a video, something that has a certain amount of time, right? Right. And maybe you have a lot of flexibility over what that looks like. You might propose that you want to do a full 90-minute feature film, and you feel really excited about that because you've never done a film before and you think you can do it. Well, but you have three weeks and you're not going to be able to do it in three weeks. So what does it look like? What does the scope of that look like?
00:13:46
Speaker
within the assignment requirements, within the particular genre that's being asked for. And again, you might not ever create another film, but those decisions are still applicable to the kinds of of decisions you need to make in other situations in terms of what is the scope of this project.
00:14:02
Speaker
Yeah, getting a bit more concrete. We have a course called inm ME 1670 and this is a course that our students often take concurrently with English 1102. In this class, students have to consider audience perspectives to make technical drawings. I do a lot of drawings by hand and also in CAD, Computer Assisted Design. They have to collaborate in a team and then they also have to write an individual design report.
00:14:26
Speaker
What do you recommend that these students do to really maximize their ability to transfer what they should already know from English 1101 and 1102 into success in this course?
00:14:37
Speaker
Well, if they're actually taken concurrently, I would sort of be constantly be asking myself and looking for those connections between those two classes, right? So what are is it you're learning about audience and purpose and, you know, the rhetorical situation, genre, and maybe even issues of design and visual communication that mean you might be doing that you're also doing in ME1670? And it works the other way too. like You're probably learning things in ME1670 about particular things that might be applicable to what you're learning in English 11 or 2. Definitely. I know that the professor in that class talks to them a lot about really emphasizing with audience perspective whenever they're doing these technical drawings.
00:15:18
Speaker
Absolutely. Again, like the most important thing I learned in college was this this idea of audience. And these are two different ways that are certainly related. And I think that they can work together to become that much richer and deeper. So if you were taking it concurrently, I would be really be thinking about you know when you're in your English class, when you're thinking about your audience, what does that look like from the point of view of the ME1670? And then vice versa as well.
00:15:42
Speaker
um And this is good practice. like You really are meant to be thinking about your classes in conversation with each other. Universities often aren't set up to quite do that often because we see we taking these these sort of separate classes all over the place. But I think you can that can be really useful and valuable if you are really thinking through and reflecting on how your classes, in general, like connect to each other. Oh, definitely. We can go on for an hour about the purpose of the university.
00:16:08
Speaker
Yes, right.
Reflecting on Coursework for Professional Application
00:16:10
Speaker
You know, if you've already taken English 1101 and 1102, and then you're taking ME1670, it's still a matter of trying to make those connections. And it might be worthwhile going back and looking at your notes from English 1102, looking back at your assignments, thinking about how you thought about audience in particular, and how that might inform the things that you're doing in ME1670. Ultimately, when you're thinking about users and clients, at least part of that is communication, right? Or maybe a lot of it is communication, depending on how you might define how broad communication is. But yeah, I i think it's just a matter of asking those questions, getting the habit of making those connections, and trying to find the things that are similar.
00:16:52
Speaker
You brought up collaboration, so that is something that students do a lot in the Woodrow School. So could you talk a little bit about what you see to be the intersection between collaboration and communication and how the skills that they should be practicing in the first-year composition program should be transferable to the collaboration and communication they're going to be doing elsewhere?
00:17:18
Speaker
Well, and I think there's a couple of different ways of thinking about this. ah So first, in terms of collaboration, I mean, the idea of doing work with other people, doing a ah project or doing some kind of task that requires multiple people to do it, right? And again, in our professional lives, we're going to see that again and again. And that's one of the reasons why we see this also in our classes, is that Georgia Tech and universities in general want people to have experience doing collaboration because that's one thing that's going to be important. and professional life. And so thinking through, well, and some of those things are going to be communication oriented things, right? So, and even when you're doing collaborative work that's to create whatever it is you're creating in your, in your engineering class, that's going to be communicated somehow, right? Like there's almost certainly going to be some form of presentation or report or both of those things or or whatever it happens to be. And so,
00:18:15
Speaker
going through the process and thinking through this sort of project management aspect of what are all the the different things that different people are going to do? How are we going to make sure that the quality is up to standard? How do we make sure that all the pieces fit together? How do we make sure that everybody is putting in their own fair share?
00:18:33
Speaker
What do we do if that doesn't happen? I think the practice that you start getting in English 11.02 about collaboration is directly and transferable to a lot of those things. I imagine that's then built on much more directly in other classes that might go into more detail about what it looks like to think about the scope of a project or the timeline of a project and that kind of stuff.
00:18:57
Speaker
Because that is something that you'll definitely need do to have to do in the work world. I think outside or connected to that there's so there's the collaboration of groups. There's also this sort of broader and maybe the better word for this is not collaboration but like community.
00:19:11
Speaker
And so no task is really done a lot. Like it takes a village, right? It takes a village to, even when you're creating um the most sort of straightforward academic essay, and this is not to like say anything bad about academic essays, that's what I write, right? That's still involved with community, right? Like you want to get feedback from other people because ultimately you you don't know how other people are going to take it until you see them take it or they they give you that feedback.
00:19:37
Speaker
And so it's kind of a collaboration to a certain extent where everything is done with other people and that continues on into the working world. Like I i talked about when I was doing that proposal and I didn't know how to do do exactly what that was.
00:19:53
Speaker
is I ultimately had to connect with and sort of lean on my boss and my colleagues to be mentored into those things, right? And so I couldn't have done those things without other people. Nothing is done by oneself.
00:20:08
Speaker
So we talked about a lot of the major concepts that are transferable. We named audience, purpose, rhetorical situations, ah genre, maybe genre analysis, genre
Communication Process and Adaptation
00:20:20
Speaker
expectations. Are there any others that you really want to make sure that students pick up on and and see these as overarching skills they should be using for the rest of their lives. I think the one that we haven't mentioned that's also really important is process. Like the idea of a piece of writing or a piece of communication, there's a process for doing that. And to also realize that you're gonna have to find your own process. Like that we could, you know, we talk about things like
00:20:50
Speaker
you do brainstorming and then outlining and then you do draft and then you get feedback and then you revise and then you know you go through this whole thing and that is a process although your process will probably be a little bit messier than that right but to realize that all of those things are a process particularly when we're talking about communication i would also say that almost everything that you're going to end up doing is a process right you're going to start at one place and go to the next place and you're going to get feedback on this and you're gonna it's going to continue on. I was observing a class once and they were talking about a process and talking about revision and the instructor was talking about the importance of having multiple drafts and all these different things and one of her students raised their hand and said,
00:21:32
Speaker
Yeah, I understand all this stuff, but like when you're writing, you don't have all this stuff, right? Like you like you just write it. And so the instructor was kind of like chuckled and be like, next time for my my next class, I'm going to bring in all the drafts that I have of the particular, you know, the article that I've been working on.
00:21:51
Speaker
There might be this misconception that as you become more proficient in your communication or in whatever you're working on, that somehow you're able to do it off the top of your head. And that's just not the way that it works. And so realizing that things have a process, you know, in English 11.1 and 11.2, those processes are sort of reinforced by the way that the assignments are set up. So there are particular drafts, there are particular things that you're supposed to turn in, then you reflect on.
00:22:16
Speaker
And that's a transferable thing. like So when you're doing a technical presentation or whatever it happens to be, there's still a process for that. And thinking about it as as that and planning for it as opposed to trying to do it the night before, and even that's a kind of process. But thinking really thinking seriously about the process and what's involved with that I think is really important.
00:22:36
Speaker
Okay, so from this first year composition classes, students should really develop a habit even over these two semesters to always be asking themselves, what is my audience? What is my purpose to this audience? What genre am I communicating in? What are the genre expectations of this communication?
00:22:57
Speaker
what is my ideal process, and what's my realistic process? Yeah, and and I think that's a great way of thinking about it, is creating the process might as its own process, right? like So you think, okay, this is what I think the process should be, and then you look at the what the calendar says, or and you know what you what you're doing in your other classes, or what other projects that you might be working on in a job. When your team can meet. Yeah, when your team can meet, right? Because that's going to that's going to be a big part of if you're not able to get started until your team can meet, or whatever that happens to be. And also realizing that in that process,
00:23:27
Speaker
It's going to be messy, right? like And you're going to have to make changes probably because you're going to run into red rocks. um You're going to realize that the 90 minute movie that you thought you were going to create isn't going to work in the three weeks that you have. So you have to pull back and make it in a 10 minute or maybe a five minute trailer or whatever.
00:23:42
Speaker
And so because there's just so many things going on and there's so many choices to make and so many different things can happen, you have to be flexible. And the things that we're trying to teach in our classes in English 11.1.2 are tools to help you manage how complex these situations are.
00:24:00
Speaker
Yeah. In many of our classes, for are example 2110, the final deliverable is a design report. It's really long and complicated that the students have developed over the course of the semester. So in trying to help students scaffold this, they have to turn in consecutive sections of this report with the idea that they revise based on feedback so that that section gets revised, but hopefully the comments then are also applied to the future and the writing of the next section. Yes, yeah absolutely and and I would say like I sometimes get the feeling that students think that those kinds of steps
Feedback, Revision, and the Writing Process
00:24:40
Speaker
or the kind of scaffolding you know the particular drafts that you have to turn in that those are things that are invented to have students jump through hoops in some way or like that they're only applicable to the classroom but no I mean you're going to be doing some version of that also in the professional world and it might be that your boss asks you to do some version of that like okay hand in this this section first and I'll give you feedback and then in the same kind of thing
00:25:07
Speaker
And so being aware that that's something to learn and to learn from and to take the feedback that you get seriously and reflect on it and think about how you can apply that to the next draft. And and you want to be thinking about that too in English 1101 and 1102 and then frankly in all the classes that you're taking and you know that that feedback often I think students or maybe even I think about feedback as something that's like okay, this is how I did, this is kind of my grade. But really, it's the these are clues on how you can improve as a communicator, improve as a designer, improve as whatever it is that you're working on.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah, and you're absolutely right that um we're going to be hopefully getting feedback. Hopefully, you know we all have really great mentors when we get to the workplace who who help us along the way. Like you said, you're your supervisor of that very first proposal, I'm sure, looked over a draft for you before you sent it to the client. Oh, yeah, of course.
00:26:03
Speaker
But are there any revision skills that students can take away from English 1101 and 1102 to help them also internalize this process? Because there are some classes, specifically Mechanical Engineering 3057, for example, they write five short reports and it's not a draft process. They're expected to draft with their team. yeah before they turn it in and we have a workshop day in class, but they don't get feedback from their GTAs until it's the final product. So do you have any advice that our students can be thinking about while they're in English 1101 and 1102 for how they should be coming up with a revision process for themselves or how our current 3057 students can be thinking back on revision processes you've already taken them through? Yeah, that's a great question. So I think that as you're in English 11.1 and 11.2, where the revision process is going to be relatively well-structured in relation to what's going on in the other class and certainly what's probably going on in the workplace, right? And that's part of what we do in education, professionalal education right? right where we we We start with very well-structured so you can learn it. And the idea is then that you, look you and as you said, internalize this and then you take it on yourself in other situations. It's one of the things
00:27:20
Speaker
people expect you to be able to do when you have a university education? Yes, absolutely. And so, as you're in English 11.1 and 11.2 and you're doing all these drafts, so first, as I just said, like it's not just hoops to drop through. like These are things that we want you to learn. Be serious about the the feedback that you get and realize that part of what you want to internalize is the idea and the process of getting feedback, right? And so, even if you're in a situation where there's not a structured set of drafts,
00:27:48
Speaker
get feedback anyway. Go to the communication lab communication center and sometimes it's just a matter of getting somebody to look at it and saying what you know not necessarily saying this is good or this is bad but like this is what I see at the purpose as like or what you're trying to get across and if it's not what you're trying to get across that you have a good idea that you need to revise it to make it clear and that can come from a roommate it can come from a friend it can come from a parent it can come from somebody else in the class is to get into that habit of of getting feedback, of having that kind of mirror that is going to tell you things that maybe you don't want to hear, but it's going to make your communication better. And that's really ultimately the the the goal, right?
00:28:27
Speaker
Because once you have accomplished the very difficult process of thinking from your audience's perspective, it's difficult to sort of ah override what you have in your brain already. Because I understand what I wrote. Yes. Because it's already connected in different synopses in my brain.
00:28:47
Speaker
But how do I ensure that my audiences, synopses are firing at the same rate? Or in the same places? Exactly. And so the best and sort of most straightforward way is to ask. and And obviously, that's not going to be possible for all audiences, right? But you can get towards that by having anybody else read it. And and that you trust to give you to give you feedback. Because if are you you know asking them, are there points in this that you just don't understand?
Concise Communication in Engineering
00:29:17
Speaker
because, as you said, there will be things that are clear to you but are not clear to other people. And this goes back to what I was saying from the class that I took as an undergraduate and the importance of audience. And the way that we kind of talk about this in writing studies is moving from writer-centered prose to reader-centered prose, right? Or whatever it happens to be. Writer-centered communication to readers in our communication.
00:29:41
Speaker
we can write all these things and and there are certain certain things that are meant for just for us like diary things right or like journals are probably just only ever going to be read by us for most other things it's going to be someone else and so getting that feedback from somebody else and i think that really is like the idea of internalizing this idea that i need to show this to at least one other person before i turn it in or before i give it to my boss or or whatever that this really is a skill to learn and to internalize. I think that's really important. And it's really important in ME 3057. So for example, the way this course is set up is that students will be in the lab for anywhere from two to three weeks.
00:30:24
Speaker
figuring out how to create the data that this client needs. But they only have 2,000 words to write their report, so it's very short. And they really need to think from the client's perspective because the client wasn't in the lab for the last three weeks with you, learning things across time. exactly So one, they probably don't want you, or they definitely don't want you to write chronologically because they don't have three weeks to read this. yeah But also, you need to think about what they already know and what they want to know to make your communication decisions. Yes, absolutely. so and And that's one one of the real values of having clients in these situations, is that it breaks out of the sort of the classroom bubble and really forces you to think about those sorts of things. And so they're not looking for the paper that you might have written in a a different class that might have gotten you an A in this particular situation. Right.
00:31:20
Speaker
that's not gonna be helpful for them. And so thinking about those things, like really getting into, like what is it, from their point of view, they are not the professor who's just looking for how much you know about something. That's not gonna be helpful for them. and What's gonna be helpful for them is is if if you think through what they're looking for, they're gonna try to make a decision that's, what am I gonna do with this information? What am I gonna do with this product or whatever it is, the the project that you're working on?
00:31:48
Speaker
And so what do you need to do in those 2000 words to structure it in a particular way that gives them that information as efficiently as possible,
Engineers as Decision-making Informants
00:31:59
Speaker
right? And you're exactly right. Like if you start off with, well, at the beginning of this project, we did this, and then we did this, and then we did this, and then we did this, that's almost certainly not going to work because what they're looking for is what's the top line. What's the main thing that they need? Right. One of the things we tell our students is that as engineers, the 90% of your job is going to be informing decision makers. Oh, yeah. Yes. Helping them make the decisions that they need to make. And as you move up in the career ladder, it's likely that you're going to be doing more and more communication as you go out, because you're going to be communicating with subordinates and with other colleagues and with other people. and so
00:32:38
Speaker
Yeah, you're going to be spending more time maybe than it seems communicating. And also, particularly as engineers, I would imagine, you know, helping people make decisions about particular things. And in in some cases, those decisions have applicability to broader public you know safety issues and all sorts of things. Right. Some of the decisions that will be being made can be life or death. Yeah. And realizing that those sorts of Decisions about how you prioritize information and what your audience needs to know in order to act is of great importance. That makes me think of another point that I wanted to talk with you about. So we already sort of talked about the higher level concepts that these composition courses are going to teach and how those are transferable. ME 1670, the course that many of our students will be taking concurrently with your courses, they have to write a design report on their own.
00:33:35
Speaker
And I think that there are a lot of just basic skills that I'm hoping to see our students transfer from composition to engineering like effective topic sentences. Oh, yeah. Well, and again, I think there might be misconceptions about the importance of these things. And you like you think about, oh, when you say uh effective topic sentences. Oh that sounds pretty boring or like that's only applicable to essays or in reality when you think about it effective topic sentences are communicating what is most important in that particular paragraph and what the reader or the audience is supposed to get out of that particular thing. So yeah I mean like realizing
00:34:17
Speaker
that it's it's not just a piece of communication, right? Like it leads to decisions and it leads to things that happen out in the world but beyond the the text. And so even something as small as what is your topic sentence and what evidence are you providing to support that topic sentence and all these different things is of importance because that can eventually lead to someone making a decision based on that information. And again, the vast majority of those who are not going to be alive or dead But those are going to affect things. And so you want to be aware of those things and not just sort of try to dash something something off as quickly as possible. They will be life or death, but it will likely make a difference on whether or not this client takes your recommendation yes or believes your recommendation or hires you again. yeah Because one of the things that we really value, or one of the things that we ask our students to consider whenever they're making any communication, is how can I lower the cognitive load on
Structuring Communication for Effectiveness
00:35:13
Speaker
my audience? yeah And one of the ways that you can do that is by leaning into expected formats for communication. so Usually, even in in high school, I learned expected paragraph structure is topic sentence, yeah evidence that supports that topic sentence, some kind of commentary that supports that evidence that could be explanation, justification, yeah argumentation analysis, any of those, more evidence, and then you repeat the process with the commentary and then transition. And yeah, that can seem a little high school and formulaic, but
00:35:46
Speaker
It works. Yes. And of course, it's a template and templates are meant to be broken when they need to be broken. But it can lower cognitive load. Absolutely. And so and that's the the value of genres too, is that we genres being these repeated ways of organizing information that reduce cognitive load. And so we see that there's these are particular ways to expect particular information to happen in particular ways.
00:36:12
Speaker
And you know, in a technical report or a document, the expectation is not, I'm going to talk about the thing I did first, the thing I did second. Chronological is a way to to organize information. It's not the best or a good way of doing it. It's often not paired with A purpose outside of demonstrating your knowledge or process. Or a purpose of getting the thing done. Right. right And so it doesn't always necessarily have to take like a lot of time to like go from the thing that you do to just get it done to the thing that's at least somewhat thought about and is a little bit focused on audience and purpose.
00:36:51
Speaker
But you know the second one is going to take a little bit of thinking of thinking about, OK, what is it that they need to know, most importantly, and start with that? In most cases, there are different genres that will ask you to do slightly different things, but in the the probably in the report, it's going to be some version of that.
00:37:06
Speaker
I think what we're circling around here is the fact that in the real world, and we're trying to prepare our students as much as we can for the real world, you cannot consider things like audience, purpose, and genre in isolation. They have to be considered in relation to one another. so the genre of a lab report, your chemistry or physics professor might just want to see you walk through your process because they're just looking for you to demonstrate that you understood the concepts of the lab. But that's not how we run the labs here in ME. Instead, our labs are really client-based focus where we're not trying to discern, could you run the machinery?
00:37:49
Speaker
We're trying to discern, could you figure out what was important in this experiment so that the client can make the decisions that she needs to make?
00:38:00
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, as we're talking about this, obviously, like, wow, this is just really overwhelming. Like, there are so many different things to think about and know. And that's why, like, in English 11.1 and 11.2, we're talking about a small set of sort of strategies or or questions to ask as opposed to, I mean, it's just not possible to learn every single genre or every single single situation, right?
00:38:23
Speaker
let alone in the span of a semester but you can learn how to learn genres yes exactly and so that's what we're trying to focus on right and so part of it is a little bit of seeing what happens trying something and seeing what happens right and sometimes it's not going to work but that's why you want to get the feedback right um you want to get the feedback that says i've learned a lot about what your chronological process was for doing this project, but I haven't learned about what's important for me, right? Or I haven't learned about what your recommendation is, right?
Intentional Communication and Narrative Control
00:38:54
Speaker
Yeah. So for example, in 1670, they have to write this design report.
00:38:59
Speaker
One version of that could be you walking through your decision process, but that's not going to be the most effective way to organize this design report. Instead, you really want to have topic sentences that put forward the reason you made particular design decisions yeah and then support that with evidence of why you made this design decision and then justify that evidence. yeah as opposed to, I did this, because that's not going to be as compelling of a demonstration of the logic or the the feasibility of your design. I mean, this gets into the question of purpose, right? You know, you shouldn't assume that all purposes are the same because we we see two different purposes here. Like one purpose is
00:39:46
Speaker
to show the chronological process that led you to completing this project. And another purpose is provide me with the information I need to make a decision or persuade me about a particular kind of recommendation or they persuade me about what's most important. There's a difference between demonstrate that you can design a product versus make an argument for the design of your product. Yes.
00:40:08
Speaker
Right, exactly. And that's why it's so important to be able to articulate what purposes and sometimes it might you might not know and you need to ask more questions, right? Yeah. Whether that's from your professor or from the client. You might need to do that often and in the different courses around campus if you're not quite sure if your professor wants just a demonstration that you know this content versus if they want an argument. You might need to ask. Yeah, absolutely. It seems as if what we're talking about here then is that these communication decisions really are representative of the power that you have as a person with the information and how intentional you are in those decisions dictates how much you can exert your power to get the audience to understand the information in the way that you want them to.
00:40:59
Speaker
Yes, that's put really well. Like you have become in some small manner the expert or maybe you are the expert, right? And you have this information and this information almost certainly needs to be communicated differently than the way that you would communicate it to other experts, right?
00:41:15
Speaker
um or certainly to yourself. And so, yeah, I think the idea of being intentional is is the key, that the stuff that we're talking about in English 11 and 1112, the things that are going on in other classes, they're not just they're not just things, right? like they're not just They're not just the things, the the hoops to jump through. These are things to help you practice making those decisions when you don't have those steps that are ah required as part of the class.
Engineering Design and Communication Interconnection
00:41:39
Speaker
Right.
00:41:40
Speaker
And taking those things, making those internal things external and communicable and understandable and useful to another person is having the intensity that is key. Right, just because your professor didn't tell you you had to have a thesis and a topic sentence, that or just because you didn't intentionally sit down and figure out what your thesis and topic sentences were going to be, doesn't mean you don't have them. They're just poorly designed ones. Right. And therefore you're really giving up the power you could have had.
00:42:08
Speaker
Yes, I guess I keep on going back to, i mean admit this is the point of going back to genre and audience and purpose, right? That in that situation your audience, in this case a professor or a client, is going to be looking for what is the main idea? What is the thesis statement? If there's not one, that's going to be really confusing for them and they're not going to be able to make the decision that they want. Or they're going to give you a port grade based on that fact. They're not getting what they need out of it.
00:42:32
Speaker
And so, I mean, I like the idea of thinking of the users of the thing that you're creating, because it it makes it more sort of tangible. It's not just something that you're communicating an idea, but you're communicating information in ways that someone's going to do something with it. Especially in engineering. Yes, absolutely. Especially in engineering. And then there's there's a responsibility to that.
00:42:53
Speaker
And I think that in the idea of an attention and being intentional about your communication is a part of that responsibility. And it's not just being responsible in doing the engineering work but also in communicating it because those two things are kind of wrapped together anyway. Absolutely. One of the things we talk to our students about all the time is that the decision making process from how you design your engineering to how you design your communication are tied together inseparably. You need to be thinking about the deliverable, the communication deliverable that you're going to be giving at the end of lab while you're doing your engineering decisions.
00:43:30
Speaker
Well, yeah, in in the workplace, you're going to be communicating all the time. Like, you're going to be sending progress reports. You're going to be drafting at part of the final report of the presentation. Like, yeah, you're going to have to be giving updates to different kinds of people that are on your team or otherwise. All those are are instances of communication, more formal and less and more informal, right? But those are still pieces of communication and you still want to be thinking about audience and genre and all those different things.
00:43:56
Speaker
yeah Well, this entire episode has been about transfer and how we can really help our students be intentional and leverage these courses that they're taking. Do you have any final advice or or thoughts for our students?
00:44:11
Speaker
Just be serious and intentional and be thinking about how what you're learning in English 11.1 and 11.2 applies to other situations and making those connections and and see it as ah as as your responsibility as a professional and as a you know as an adult and a citizen to really be intentional about your communication.
00:44:32
Speaker
Yeah, well, thank you so much for coming. This has been a really valuable discussion. It's clear that the skills students develop in the composition courses go far beyond the immediate classroom. We in and in mechanical engineering see these skills as crucial to success in engineering, whether you're drafting a technical report, preparing a presentation, or working on a team. So thank you to our listeners for listening, and we'll see you next time.