Backscatter

Engineers Can’t Write? Sez Who!

By Donald Christiansen

To begin with, it is widely accepted — even among ourselves — that we engineers don’t write very well. In truth, at least in some cases, we write too much; in others, too obscurely. Yet we are stuck with the need to write. We must document and communicate what we do, or what would be the purpose or the result of our inventing, developing and designing?

As a young engineer, I was invited to address an IEEE Section meeting. My subject was an unusual stereophonic/ quadraphonic audio system developed at CBS Laboratories. This technical presentation may have been my first before a large engineering audience. I worried at the prospect. I prepared and projected a number of slides containing a bunch of mathematics that no one could follow during their brief exposure. After all, I had sat through many conference papers that were ritually peppered with unintelligible (at least to me) equations. I had responded in kind, despite my audience having many spouses present — most of whom hadn’t a clue what their mates did for a living. I was grateful to the wives, who did not boo or stamp their feet, but discreetly nodded off. The saving factor was that I concluded with a stirring demonstration of the audio system that elicited many compliments. Nevertheless, after the talk, a colleague asked me why I had included all the theory, especially in view of the mixed audience. I could not give him a good answer. I was an engineer, I thought to myself. The theory and the supporting math seemed obligatory.

But I took the criticism to heart. Later, when the paper was published for a strictly technical audience, I heavily edited the math, converting it whenever possible to a word statement of what was physically happening.

What is it that drives us to embed our writing in arcane mathematics and phraseology, and to encumber it with acronyms decipherable only in context and by the knowledgeable — and sometimes, not even then? Could it be our response to the obscure, Latin-rich writing of the medical profession? Are we hoping somehow to acquire the respectability, awe and occasional notoriety accorded medical doctors? A friendlier explanation is that we seek to express ourselves in a way that is complete, accurate, precise and not subject to misinterpretation, and that we find it necessary to rely on excess verbiage and the jargon of our profession to do so. The case also exists for satisfying the patent lawyers, leaving no possible future extensions of our disclosure uncovered.

Whatever the reason, engineers are not unique. Every profession worth the designation has devised a cryptic language to communicate among its own members. Coincidentally or not, it helps exclude the uninitiated. How we write is one way to separate ourselves from the general public and from other professions, and even to distinguish the members of our particular technical specialty.

When John Pierce of Bell Labs took over as editor of the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers (the predecessor to the Proceedings of the IEEE), he found he could not understand most of the articles. He asked each member of his editorial board to read an issue of the Proceedings to see if they could understand what they were reading. The answer came back universally that they could not. This exercise helped instigate using specialist reviewers for each Proceedings article, a procedure still in use today.

Notwithstanding, we continue to joke about the incomprehensibility of the articles in many IEEE publications. A perennial comment, seeming always to elicit a sympathetic chuckle, is that only its author and possibly one or two of its reviewers can really understand a Transactions paper.

Woody Gannett, the staff executive who oversaw publishing the technical journals for both the Institute of Radio Engineers and the IEEE, often told this story: A member submitted a paper to one of the Transactions purporting to describe a revolutionary new circuit component. After due peer review, the paper was published. Only then did the author admit to the hoax. He had described the resistor, but in such a convoluted way that its true identity had eluded the reviewers. Woody was never able to recall exactly when and where the article was published, but generations of his colleagues enjoyed the story, and I still believe it might have been true.

Ironically, even those who profess to know good communication when they see it are not immune from the trappings of scholarly publication. In a recent article in the Transactions on Professional Communication, the phrase “motivating users to process/engage text-based communication” is used. Probably this means motivating users to read, or even to read with interest and comprehension. I am not sure.

Engineers have plenty of occasions to write more than just technical papers — reports, proposals and operating and maintenance manuals, plus stuff that helps promote and sell what they create. But perhaps I’ll save those for a future column, and for the professors who are teaching engineering, writing and marketing to today’s undergraduate engineering students.

Meanwhile, can you please keep whatever you write a bit shorter, more to the point, and limit your use of acronyms? And as a personal favor, can you find a title for your next journal article that has fewer than 20 words? Thanks.

In fairness, I will say that I have both written and criticized technical papers, and I should tell you the latter is much easier.

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Donald Christiansen is the former editor and publisher of IEEE Spectrum and an independent publishing consultant. He can be contacted at donchristiansen@ieee.org.