Developing Industrial Cases for Technical Writing on Campus

David Mair and John Radovich

At the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893, the World’s Engineering Congress met and included special section, “Division E, Engineering Education.” This division was the seed for The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and one paper delivered in the section was "Training of Students in Technical Literary Work,” evidencing early concern about engineers’ education in technical writing.1 But concern alone did not solve the problem. Two decades later Edward D. Sabine, a terminal engineer, complained that most college graduated engineers could not even write a decent letter.2 And in the same year F. W. Springer, a professor of electrical engineering, spoke of the need for teaching “engineering-English.”3 Fifty years ago Hale Sutherland, a professor of Civil Engineering, described how Case School of Applied Science had instituted a two-course, technical writing requirement to overcome “the engineer’s ancient weakness, his inability to speak and write effectively.”4 One approach to solving this problem has been cooperation. Seventy years ago C. W. Park wrote an article about the cooperative program at the University of Cincinnati, in which members of the Engineering and English Departments worked together to promote better writing; obviously the idea of teaming up is hardly new.5 Thirty years ago The Journal of Engineer­ing Education published another description of a cooperative effort6 and just five years ago devoted an entire issue to technical writing. The need for teaching engineers to write and the difficulties in accomplish­ing the objective even cooperatively have been recognized for almost a century; we are still grappling with the problem.

One of the things we have learned is that writing tasks in industry are quite different from most assignments in academia, and to prepare students for professional careers we must simulate industry’s writing tasks. The precise kinds of writing demanded of engineers may vary with their field, particular employer, and level of advancement within the corporate structure; however, one character­istic remains the same: technical writing is situational. Seldom, if ever, will professional engineers choose a topic on which to write a report; they will be assigned a project which will be concluded when a report is submitted. In other instances, engineers may perceive a problem within their corporation and submit, unsolicited, a recom­mendation of how to correct the problem. In both cases, the engineer is giving a written response to a particular situations; the engineer will rarely write something in a vacuum. For this reason, assignments in a technical writing course should require students to respond to specific situations.

In order to construct assignments that can be evaluated in the context of an Engineer’s professional experience, the instructor needs a "teaching” knowledge of both rhetoric and engineering—a combina­tion seldom found. A professor of English trained in composition can teach the forms of technical writing and the processes to achieve these forms. Practical situations in which the engineering student is given a job-related assignment are most valuable in developing judgment as well as writing skills. The English professor is not familiar enough with engineering, the types of problems, or the methods of empirical solution and evaluation used by the practicing engineer to complete such assignments. The English professor cannot construct realistic, technical situations that include problems, methods of solution, re­sults and conclusions. The engineering professor can, but he or she is unprepared to teach the forms or processes of technical writing. F. W. Springer, quoted earlier, stated in the same article from 1913 that teachers of engineering-English should “at least have an engineering perspective, if not engineering training.”7 Others have suggested that teachers of technical writing should have industry experience as a writer or editor.8 My experience indicates that both are helpful but still are not enough. As a pilot project to solve the problem, I teamed up with John Radovich, Professor of Chemical Engineering with five years experience as a process engineer at Sunoco, in order to develop industry-related assignments for students of chemical engineering. These students take technical writing at the same time they take a junior-level laboratory class, unit operations lab. The example de­scribed below center on chemical engineering but the process can be used to develop assignments for upper-division students in any field of engineering.

John and I began by discussing a written description of what each section of a document might contain and why it is included. An example of a simple document is the letter of inquiry. The body of this document identifies the letter as an inquiry about a product produced by the reader’s company. The problem that exists in the writer’s company is described in order to provide a partial guide for the reader’s selection of material that will be included in the reply. Specific questions about the product are the main guide for the reader’s selection of information for the reply. The questions them­selves are inquiries about the qualities of the product which will be the criteria for the writer’s decision (or recommendation) on whether to purchase the product. The body of the letter closes with an expression of the writer’s appreciation for the reader’s time and effort in consid­ering the request. The description of a realistic situation which would require an engineer to write had always been difficult for me as an English professor. At best, the problems I could construct were vague and hypothetical. The qualities of the product which would be the criteria for the writer’s decision also remained fuzzy. Now, working with John, the technical content needed to construct realistic assign­ments was available.

After discussing the letter’s inclusions, John began to construct a situation that would require writing. He selected a product advertised in a professional journal, choosing an advertisement with con­siderable information on the product’s performance. He also was careful to select a product that was relatively familiar to the students and that was not so complex that they would have no sense of how the product functioned. Then, working backwards, he constructed a problem in a hypothetical corporation that would be solved by the product. Within this description, the criteria for judging the product were implied. A draft of an assignment for the letter of inquiry is shown in Figure 1.
Simms Co. produces bleaching agents and in the process recovers sodium hypochlorite, which is highly corrosive. The sodium hypo­chlorite has destroyed glass and flourinated hydrocarbon, tubular heat exchangers. The flow rate of the sodium hypochlorite is 100 gpm at 50 psi, and this process fluid has a viscosity of 1200 centipoise. The inlet temperature is 100°F and the desired outlet temperature is 75°F. Water is used as a service fluid and enters the exchanger at 57°F at a flow rate as high as l20 gpm. As a process engineer for Simms Co., you are writing APV, Inc. to ask if they produce an exchanger which can handle the cooling task and resist the corrosiveness of sodium hypo­chlorite. You also want information on higher capacity exchangers be­cause your output is expanding.

FIGURE 1

To this draft and those for other assignments, we usually added an audience, stipulating educational and experiential background. (We did not in the sample shown here because the audience for a letter of inquiry is often unknown.) Audiences for some assignments were stipulated so that the amount and types of detail included had to be varied from the would be included for another chemical engineer. Engineers must frequently write for non-technical audiences, and our variations in audience simulated this fact. However, even these variations in audience do not simulate the typical writing tasks in industry. The case shown in figure 1 includes only details which must be included in the letter for the reader and his or her use. This case would require the student to do little more than rewrite the material in second person and in the format of a letter. This hardly simulates the problems students will encounter as professionals. On the job, students will gather material from laboratory notes, notes jotted down on sheets of paper at odd moments, and from their own memories. Much of the information which relates to a problem will be peripheral and not of use to the reader of a letter of inquiry or other types of documents. To be efficient writers, the students will have to select from a mass of detail that which will be of use to the reader and directly further their purposes as writers. Therefore, we added extraneous (but realistic) details that students would eliminate if they carefully considered the reader’s use of the document. By varying audiences and including details which must be critically examined in light of audience and use, the assignments became communication tasks with a context similar to those faced by engineers in industry. Figure 2 shows the final form for the letter of inquiry assignment. Extraneous detail is underscored.
Your plant (Simms Co./3225 State St./Salt Lake City, UT 84112), which produces the bleaching agents Chloride dioxide (C102) and Sodium Bisulfilte (NaHSO3), uses a process for recovering sodium hypochlorite that has already destroyed four glass tubular exchangers and two fluorinated hydrocarbon tubing exchangers (total valuation of six exchangers is $84,000). The flow rate of the sodium hypoclorite through the ex­changers is 100 gpm at 50 psi. The solution’s viscosity is 1200 centipoise. The inlet temperature is 100 degrees F and the desired outlet temperature is 75 degrees F. Water at 57°F and l2gpm is available as the service fluid. You want to know if the APV Company, Inc. of Tona­wanda, NY sells heat exchangers to do the job. You need to know the sizes of the heat exchangers available and the expected heat transfer coefficients. Also, you would like the heat transfer area required for your current operation. You also want information on the range of larger capacity exchangers available because your company is in a growth stage (20% per year for the last two years) and may want high capacity equipment sometime in the future.

FIGURE 2

The assignment for a corresponding response was then easily con­structed because the characteristics of the product, in this case a heat exchanger, were contained in the advertisement used to create the letter of inquiry assignment.

Short recommendation reports and requests were constructed in a similar fashion. After discussing the structure and content of these reports, John created realistic problems that an engineer might be asked to solve in industry. The methods of solution and results were included in the assignment along with a stipulated audience and the reader’s use of the report. We again included extraneous detail and also terms for which the audience would need definitions. In the sample shown in Figure 3, extraneous material is underscored and terms which need definition, and abbreviations which need to be written out are circled. In addition, we randomly ordered the infor­mation in the cases. We did this because it is unlikely that a writer’s notes and information retrieved from memory would be organized in exactly the pattern of organization best suited for his or her purpose and the reader’s use. In fact, the pattern of information, if it has anything approaching a logical order, will be inverted. Engineers work inductively: they are presented with a problem, select methods of solution, implement the methods which yield results, interpret the results, and reach a conclusion. Most technical documents reorder information so that conclusions an engineer makes are presented very early, forming what Kinneavy calls an “inverted induction” common to informative discourse.9 Therefore, we made the order of the data random in the case thereby requiring students to consider organiza­tional patterns for the material.
Case Corporation’s refinery efficiency manager, John Greenbaum, has worked in the Comptroller’s office of the marketing division for two years and has no engineering background at all. These two years are his only experience in the oil industry. He wants to find some way of making money on the used catalyst from the dehydrogenation pre­treater at Plant 71. You are the Plant Engineer at Plant 71, and he has asked you to come up with a recommendation. There are approximately 50 tons of spent catalyst stores in the refinery warehouse at Twin Maple, Texas.
In response to Mr. Greenbaum’s request, you have come up with the following options:
1) regenerate the catalyst and reuse it in the desulfurizer,
2) sell the catalyst for heavy metals recovery, or
3) dispose of the catalyst at an appropriate dump site.
Before you can make a recommendation, you must differentiate among the options. To do this, you need the following additional information.
1—testing of the spent catalyst for wt % Ni and Mo; presence of metal contaminants, catalytic activity, and loss-on-ignition. The refinery lab can only do the activity and loss-on-ignition testing, but the corpora­tion’s research and development lab can do the other tests. You need authorization to get these tests done.
—You have no facilities for determining if the heavy metals in the catalyst are worth recovering. American Cynamid will do such a test and make a cost estimate for the recovery. They need 200 lbs of spent catalyst for the tests and $1500. You need authorization.
—You don’t know what the disposal costs are for the catalyst. However, the Environmental Group, under Mr. Greenbaum, has expertise in the area and should give you a cost estimate.
—CCI Company can determine if the catalyst can be regenerated and how much it will cost. You must send them a one ton sample. Tests in the research and development desulfurization unit with the regener­ated catalyst must be done.

FIGURE 3

For the proposal, progress report, and formal completion re­port, we followed a pattern similar to that used in developing assign­ments for the letter of inquiry. Considering the information gained from experiments completed in unit operations lab, John created hypothetical company problems, and I placed them in a Department of Energy request for proposals (RFP) that I had shortened and modified. The students considered themselves employees of UOL Empiricists, Incorporated, a consulting firm with the same bench-scale facilities as in the unit operations laboratory. The firm was divided into three divisions according to types of testing and a lab instructor was designated as the supervisor of each section, and faculty members were named to positions of president, vice president, and other typical positions within a corporate structure. The student writing the proposal was designated as project engineer and his or her lab partners as engineers working under him or her in the proposed project. Hourly rates for work by employees at all levels were given. With these designations, a student was able to write a proposal that included management, cost, and offeror’s capabilities sections as well as the technical section.

Students wrote a progress report and formal completion report on the project they proposed and completed in lab, but they wrote these reports as if to a client. The final report written on the project offered an interesting and informative opportunity for comparison and contrast. The students submitted a final report on the experiment to the lab instructor in unit operations as well as to me as if I were the client with the corporate problem they had proposed to solve. Though the two reports covered exactly the same subject, they were markedly different because the audiences and uses of the reports were different as well as each writer’s purposes for writing. This kind of comparison dramatically demonstrates how audience, purpose, and use shape a document, and it does so with much greater impact than a declaration by an instructor in a lecture.

The process of developing assignments described here may sound time consuming and difficult, especially if it is to be repeated for all the areas of study pursued by students enrolled in technical writing. However, after written descriptions and samples of each type of document are completed by the writing instructor for the first set of assignments, the majority of the work for developing assignments in all areas is complete. Little but discussion and clarification with engineering professors in other areas is necessary to develop other cases. This method of developing cases offers some advantages over working with engineers in industry to develop materials. Finding engineers working in all the same areas of students in a class can pose problems. Convincing working engineers that you will protect their anonimity and disguising materials so the company becomes unrec­ognizable place additional demands on the writing instructor. But perhaps the most significant advantage is that engineers working in industry have little sense of the level of technicality which is accessible to students of engineering. A professor in engineering, on the other hand, knows quite well what students are capable of understanding and therefore can match the level of technicality to students’ capabili­ties.

The case assignments for the course, then, were constructed to simulate the communication tasks that students will face as profes­sionals. The technical content was carefully matched to the students’ level of understanding and field of specialization. This not only better prepares students for writing in industry but also increases motiva­tion in the classroom. By applying the ideas we have known about for the last seventy years and combining the knowledge of professors of engineering and English, we can continue improving our preparation of students for professional careers.10

University of Oklahoma
Norman, Oklahoma
NOTES
1 Arthur N. Talbot, “Origin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education,’ The Journal of Engineering Education, 24 (1933), 39-41.
2 Edward D. Sabine, ‘How Can College and the Industries Cooperate,” Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 4, No. 2 (1913), 65-66.
3 F. W. Springer, "Fundamentals of Education,” Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 4, No. 2 (1913), 26.
4Hale Sutherland, “Humanities in Engineering Education,” The Journal of Engineering Education, 24 (1934), 545.
5C. W. Park, “Cooperation in the Teaching of English to Engineering Students,” Bulletin of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, 4, No. 8 (1914), 49-50.
6 Israel Swelt and Kenneth E. Quier, "The Teaching of Report Writing: A Cooperative Program,” The Journal of Engineering Education, 44 (1954), 622-627.
7Springer, p. 26.
8Paul V. Anderson, "Teaching the Teacher What Government and Industry Want from Technical Writing,” in Technical and Professional Communications, ed. Thomas M. Sawyer (Ann Arbor: Professional Communication Press, 1977), p. 72.
9James L. Kinneavy, A Theory of Discourse (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1971), p. 153.
10 We would like to thank the Office of Instructional Services and the Univer­sity Associates at the University of Oklahoma for the grant which made this project possible.