Rehabilitating the Arrogant (!) Engineer
One challenge to writing the best possible e-mail, text message, memo, or letter is to develop a clear idea of exactly who will be reading your words. Understanding your audience is an important part of any writing task.
As the authors of The Essentials of Technical Communication maintain, you should “Always analyze your reader as carefully as possible, particularly the reader’s frame of reference and attitude toward both you and the subject” (p. 126). The executive summary of an engineering proposal, for example, should be written for the layperson and not the professional engineer, just as an engineering standards manual must be written with a clear sense of the engineer-reader’s technical background.
Yet many professional engineers are criticized for being too arrogant, or valuing their own technical knowledge above the unique knowledge and accomplishments of less-technical users. While writing our daily documents, we must keep this in mind and try to understand our audience without diminishing their own abilities.
Read the short article, “Rehabilitating the Arrogant Engineer” at
http://pandodaily.com/2012/08/08/rehabilitating-the-arrogant-engineer/ (Links to an external site.)
Then, write a post here that responds to this article and shares your own thoughts on this important subject. As an engineer, how do you deal with the frustration of working with non-technical users? Why is it important to remain courteous and even-tempered in our professional lives? Can you give an example of a particularly challenging incident in your own student or professional career? Finally, how does understanding our audience help us in our technical writing as an engineering professional?
Your post should be about 200 words long.
After you make your post, come back to this forum and read a few of your classmates’ posts. Post a response to at least three of your peer’s comments before the due date for this Discussion assignment. Be sure to provide a thoughtful response: don’t just say, “I agree” or “You are so right!” Use these responses as a way of beginning a dialogue with other class members.
Important: please see the Online Discussion Participation Grading Criteria document posted with this assignment. These are the criteria that I will use to grade this and all future Discussion assignments.
