[M.K. Thompson]The secret to good writing

When I ask students why they do not pursue a career in engineering, they often tell me that engineering requires "too much math." I recall when I shared the same view. As a student, I took several advanced math classes. I did many homework assignments that required complex derivations and long calculations. I can remember days when I was so immersed in my work that I dreamed in equations.

Today I do almost no math. I haven`t solved a differential equation by hand in years. That isn`t to say that engineering doesn`t require math -- it does. My students have several computers crunching numbers around the clock in my research lab. And, you still need to understand the math to ensure that the computers are working on the correct problem. But for the most part we do the thinking and computers do the solving.

What I do more than anything else today is write. I write research grants and research papers. I write lectures and homework assignments. I write more email than you can possibly imagine. The only way to escape writing is to escape the office and spend the day on a mountain top. And even then, I spend some of my time thinking about what I will write about when I return.

Engineering programs all over the world are beginning to emphasize "soft skills" like leadership, teamwork, writing and other forms of communication for good reason. It does not matter how good your ideas are or how interesting and exquisite your mathematic manipulations are if you cannot share them with others.

This issue has become so critical in science and technology that many universities, including Northwestern University and KAIST, are integrating first year design subjects with communication courses. Other universities, including MIT, also require a substantial technical writing component in upper level science and engineering classes.

So what is the secret to successful writing? Practice, of course, is critical, as are editing and revision. It certainly helps to have a solid foundation in grammar and the mechanics of writing. But I think that the key to good writing is having something to say.

We sometimes tell children, "If you can`t say anything nice, don`t say anything at all." A reasonable corollary would be "If you can`t write anything intelligent, don`t write anything at all." In school this is never an option. Students are forced to keep weekly journals or write essays about (sometimes hopelessly dull) literature in the name of their education. Often what they learn is to hate writing.

I would be happier to have students writing fantastic essays about Batman comic books than painful essays about 19th century literature. Certainly they would read less literature that way, but their writing might improve. Maybe there is value in decoupling writing and its subject matter from an educational perspective.

Since I am not a professor in the humanities, I cannot substitute the Caped Crusader for Cervantes, Chaucer or Chekhov. I have students write papers on their work in engineering instead. "Write what you know" is a rule of thumb in writing. After three months of work on a design project, students know a great deal about their topic and have much to say. Their pride in their work and enthusiasm for their projects comes through in the writing. Their papers are a pleasure to read.

The best opportunity to practice your writing is not in your diary or in a daily journal. It is not in history papers or English essays. It is online. How many emails do you write each day? How many blog posts? How many tweets or instant messages do you send? How quickly would your writing improve if you attempted to use proper grammar and punctuation in those messages and eschewed the lure of the lol?

What if you re-read and edited every email before sending? Once you learn to organize your emails and catch the typos in short messages, it becomes much easier to do so for longer papers and for books. Not only would your writing improve, the effectiveness of your messages would also increase.

Pictures are worth a thousand words. They can also save you a substantial amount of time by organizing your writing. For a lab report, academic thesis, or other large technical document, try putting the pictures in first. This will form the structure for your chapter and help you write around your data.

Writing will always be a difficult task, but it becomes easier with time, patience, and practice. Try to make your writing as clear and convincing as you can. If you can`t make it interesting, at least make it short. Be ruthless in your editing. Be kind to your editor(s). And never forget your audience.



M. K. Thompson