Tutorial on Writing 3 for ME4001, Introduction to Engineering Lawrence Cleary Shannon Consortium Regional Writing Centre, UL

Coursework 3 The student shall prepare a report on an aspect of the engineering profession that intrigues / impresses / worries them. They will locate a problem that is specific to that aspect of the profession and prepare a report on how the profession has sought to resolve the issue. The student shall pick the subject area, perform research on the subject and present the work in a report. Analysing the question To analyse the title, it is useful to follow the following steps: Identify the topic. If the topic has a restriction or expansion, identify it. Search for the aspect. This is the angle or point of view on the subject matter. Often, the aspect is a phrase ending in 'of', e.g. 'the importance of', 'the contribution of'. Be sure you are clear about how the aspect relates to the subject matter. It can be an example of it, a stage in its sequence, the cause or effect, one of the solutions to it as a problem etc. Identify the instruction (which often comes at the beginning) and decide what it means and what it requires you to do. Check whether there is a viewpoint and if so, if it the same as your own.

Last Time: Information Organization Cohesion largely depends on repetition and logical order. What is the sentence about? How does the theme of the sentence contribute to the paragraph, and does it have a logical relationship to the sentences preceding and following? How is the information organized? Can you chart it?

Features of Engineers’ Writing What typifies academic writing? If you were to characterise the academic writing done by engineers, by comparison to that done by students in the Humanities, what characteristics most distinguish the two types for you? Lexical density: Does one contain more information than another. Word count to content word count. Are they similar? Exercise 1. Students need to count the number of words in the section that is coded for lexical density. Then, students should look at the number of colored words in that section. Calculate percentages of colored to non-coloured words.

4 Features of Engineers’ Writing Informational density—more content words are packed into the clause Abstraction—turning processes into participants in the process Technicality—the use of technical vocabulary and using verbs of relational process Authoritativeness—refraining from the use of first person references or references to his or her mental processes Abstraction: scientific language theorizes concrete life experiences into abstract entities, which can then be further examined and critiqued. Such theorizing involves turning processes (as expressed by verbs and adjectives) into participants (as expressed by nouns). This remodeling of grammar, from verbs or adjectives into nouns, is referred to as “nominalization” (Halliday, 1998). Nominalization involves more than remodeling of grammar (or re-grammaticizing), however. It also is a process of re-meaning or re-semanticizing (Halliday, 1998). in Text 1, this narrowing raises questions about “what is being narrowed,” “what is the extent of the narrowing,” and “what causes the narrowing.” Asthma attacks, on the other hand, buries the specific symptoms of asthma, such as wheezing and becoming short of breath. Nominalization can, therefore, create problems for readers, because it tends to neutralize or obscure meanings and construct an ideology that is often not transparent to na¨ıve readers. Readers will have to recover the hidden meanings and resolve ambiguities in order to gain full understanding. With respect to technical language. Long noun phrases and verbs of relational process. “Verbs of relational process…are verbs or verb phrases that can be used to define (e.g., are, is called), classify (are made of, belong to), compare /contrast (e.g., is younger than, have twice as much as), or characterize (e.g., is vicious, have sharp claws) the thing in question” (342).

Information Density The writing of engineers is lexically dense “...the world is a world of things, rather than of happenings; of product, rather than process; of being rather than becoming” (Halliday1987, pp. 146-47). The style is “associated with carefully planned, formal writing” (Kopple 2003, p.1). Abstraction: scientific language theorizes concrete life experiences into abstract entities, which can then be further examined and critiqued. Such theorizing involves turning processes (as expressed by verbs and adjectives) into participants (as expressed by nouns). This remodeling of grammar, from verbs or adjectives into nouns, is referred to as “nominalization” (Halliday, 1998). Nominalization involves more than remodeling of grammar (or re-grammaticizing), however. It also is a process of re-meaning or re-semanticizing (Halliday, 1998). in Text 1, this narrowing raises questions about “what is being narrowed,” “what is the extent of the narrowing,” and “what causes the narrowing.” Asthma attacks, on the other hand, buries the specific symptoms of asthma, such as wheezing and becoming short of breath. Nominalization can, therefore, create problems for readers, because it tends to neutralize or obscure meanings and construct an ideology that is often not transparent to na¨ıve readers. Readers will have to recover the hidden meanings and resolve ambiguities in order to gain full understanding.

Do you write like an engineer? We have asked: “How is the writing of engineering students similar or different from other kinds of academic writing, for instance, papers written by students in Humanities?” We have compared models of writing from professionals in Engineering to those from professionals in the Humanities and noticed differences We have compared our own writing to the model Engineering texts.