Editor’s Note: This article was originally published in April 2016, so it is part of the Best of Corrigo series. However, based on the interest in a similar article, I decided to republish it as a Conversation Starter as well.
It has been updated for 2020.
After twenty years of editing science, research, education, and engineering documentation, some of my favorite people to edit for are engineers. This baffles some of my fellow editors, who find engineers confusing or complicated to work with, and so I began to teach courses on how to navigate editing with engineers, and with engineering content. (I also teach courses for engineers to learn to write better.)
I am always delighted to discuss this topic further – please feel free to write to me! I’m easy to find on the Internet.
Q: Why would an editor want to teach engineers to write?
Because it’s so much fun! I find engineers to be generally very thoughtful and considering people, always looking at a problem from a number of angles and challenging dogmatic ideas. This matches my own approach to life and to language, so I love discussing English with engineers.
Conversations with high-IQ scientifically-minded people are great. You just won’t get the same level of analytical, methodical thought from a room full of literature majors, who have been trained in a completely different way of thinking.
I love the engineering approach to language. Engineers are taught to invent, to innovate, to question. They spend all day optimizing the efficiency of various systems. And isn’t that essentially exactly the same process editors go through when we edit? We read each sentence, and question if it is doing the best possible job to communicate. Should we trim words? Add a comma? These are all functional decisions aimed at speedy, clear transmission of information.
Ergo, if you ask me, editors and engineers are a natural match!
(Caveat: I know that as editors, we also can have long sets of rules, listed in books and project-specific style sheets, so some editors may have thought, before they read this article, that all editors do is, police-like, enforce rules. Engineers have set of rules and principles too, of course – all of physics, chemistry, and mathematics. The key is to focus on application, reason, and function, when explaining to engineers.
If you’re a dogmatic, authoritarian sort who can’t bear to be questioned and to reasonably and scientifically debate why one word choice or text layout or document format is preferable to another, or give the reasoning behind your rules, then you might not like engineers—they want reason with their rhyme.)
Q: Won’t it put editors out of business if all the engineers and others learn how to write better?
There is nothing to fear. We will never run out of work editing for engineers, because there will always be, in our lifetimes, a lot of work for engineers to do, and they need to write reports, memos, and procedures for the work that they do. They also need to communicate well with clients, each other, and the public.
Good Reasons to Teach
Even if you mentor and teach some of your individual clients to be much better writers, even if they become such great writers that they don’t really need you any more, fear not! There will be plenty of new engineers to appreciate your gifts.
And as we all know, one client who values you will often refer you to many more clients.
Another point is that often, if you hold a class to teach all the engineers in your company how to do what you do, the result is that they value you more because they understand better that you are doing more, with a deeper background, to their manuscripts than they know how to do themselves. The general public often misunderstands what editors do, exactly. So teaching classes about what you do will often result in your clients valuing your work more highly. Not everyone has a passion or a skill for editing.
Ergo, there is absolutely no need to hold back. It’s well worth it to share all of our trade secrets with our clients, engineers or not. Mentor away! It is more likely that the result of you teaching your clients how you make their writing better will be increased appreciation for you, not a loss of work. I also love it when I see clients, or whole research groups of clients, improve their writing over the years. They still send it to me to edit, but they’re getting better all the time. It’s just good for everybody.
Benefits to Working with Engineers
Another factor at play in editing for engineers and scientists in English is that you get to work with plenty of brilliant people from all over the world, because engineers travel (and immigrate) a lot for work. Their English might not be perfect, but that might be because it’s their fourth, fifth, or sixth language!
A special boon arises if you have clients with romance languages as their first language. Then, you get to edit poetry. Sometimes a French, Italian, or Spanish-first-language writer delivers sentences so beautiful and musical that I find it a shame to reduce the word count with ruthless efficiency. We must edit it to make it easier to read the science, of course, but sometimes it seems slightly less beautiful, somehow.
Q: How do you teach engineers to write?
Here are a few useful strategies to start with if you have engineers who would like you to teach them how to improve their writing.
Speak functionally. Engineers love to know how things work. If you explain how white space helps to highlight the important points by reducing reader fatigue and distraction, and give some examples to demonstrate it, then engineers are way more likely to jump on that train than if you just tell them abstractly that they should use more white space.
Guidelines are good, too, but if you recite a lot of rules without backing them up with good reasons, engineers are likely to analyze themselves out of using your rules.
Since engineers WILL analyze, participate in the analysis. Sometimes we need to take a step back ourselves. If we are asking people to follow rules that we can’t back up with sound logic, functional science, and a history of how that rule came into being, then maybe there’s something wrong with the rule!
Use examples. Examples teach like theory never can. Great teaching (or style guides or instructions for projects) includes both examples and theory.
Example:
Let’s say that someone in your class, or in a company that you edit for, has brought up the case of putting one or two spaces after a period. Some writers do not like the fact that this rule has changed in their lifetime, and they have plenty of reasons not to follow the new rule.
If you don’t tell them WHY they should only use one space after a period, you will find you have a low compliance rate.
However, if you explain that two spaces was appropriate when we used typewriters, but that computer programs are designed to use just one space, and that it will look wonky if they use two, that will get a lot of converts. Engineers understand changing technology and modernization.
But you will still have some holdouts. So try an authority-based viewpoint. “It’s what we do in the publishing industry. You may notice that every book in the bookshop and every journal you ever submitted a paper to, strip out the extra spaces.”
That might get you a few more converts.
Next, you might try a second, even more intricate functional argument: Double spaces on word processing programs create large white spaces between sentences, which will lead to rivers of white space between sentences. These rivers of white space have been proven in multiple controlled experiments by readability experts to make readers’ eyes wander and get distracted from the reading at hand.
Load yourself up with knowledge, not arrogance. As the spaces-after-period example shows, sometimes you just need to patiently have more information than they can possibly contradict.
And then you patiently have to accept that some of them are still going to disagree and keep using two spaces after a period, the way they were taught in 1973. Don’t sweat it. Just add it to a standard editing task you do on that person’s papers when you receive them.
Q: How do you know that you’re teaching with any success?
A good indicator of success is when people ask follow-up questions.
You can deliver all the information in class, and even have people work through examples, but the real learning happens when the engineers are back at their desks, working on the writing they get paid to do. When they email with questions on how to apply the principles taught in the course—for example, how to make something more readable, or how to add more white space to five dense pages of report—then I know they’re processing what they learned.
Q: Do you have any tips for others who need to teach writing?
Be humble. You probably know a lot, but always remember to listen while you’re talking, too. Laugh at your own mistakes (such as writing the wrong word on the board, or having a typo in your materials) rather than getting uppity. Consider this strategy: Take along small wrapped chocolates (or, I have found that home-made banana bread is a real winner as an ice breaker!) to share with students who point out your mistakes. It keeps class lively and students engaged.
Be flexible. Remember that each class of students has different needs, so your teaching should flex to fit those needs. A great teacher never teaches two classes exactly the same, or two individuals exactly the same, though the core material may be similar.
Be practical, not theoretical. There’s no need to train report writers extensively on English grammar terms (antecedents and prepositions and the like). Teach them what they need to know in terms that interest them. Not because they can’t learn the grammar terms, but because it is more interesting to focus on how and why to do what they actually need to do – communicate with clients and/or peers – than to load the course with abstract grammar terminology. For example, you might not love long discussions of quantum dynamics using the Greek alphabet – don’t expect others to love the just-as-obscure grammar terminology just because you enjoy it, or you were taught that way. Teach it a new way, focussed on the students in the room and their interests and desires.
Be prepared to repeat yourself. If you are working within a company context, you will have the opportunity to teach through weekly emails, commentary in document edits, and daily conversations, not just in classes. Don’t expect everyone to understand, process, and instantly apply every point that you teach. Be patient when you need to reteach something or remind people now and then.
Use the “textbook in the room.” If you can get senior and intermediate people to come to your corporate courses, and make it well known that you respect and want to hear from those people, your courses will have much more ongoing impact for the juniors in that company. Each company has its own rules and styles. Having people in the room who can speak intelligently about how the company has traditionally done things, client needs, and challenges particular to their company, is valuable if you can manage it. You will have more success with the juniors if they see the seniors welcoming you and including you as part of their formula for success.
Have good teaching resources. Write your own, or feel free to access the PDFs at www.solarosatech.com. (I wrote them, and I am offering them to you to use free or by donation.)
Keep them engaged. Discard the slide decks and video projectors. Put pens and paper in their hands. There’s no better way to learn than by doing, so get them working. Break up your informational sections of the lesson with examples and exercises to try, and the course will fly by.
Enjoy what you do. Teaching engineers and scientists to write is really fun. Do know your stuff, inside and out, but go prepared to debate and analyze and say “you’re right” now and then, without any worries or egos in the way.
Love your clients, and they’ll love you right back!