Posted: September 13th, 2017

Summary

Paper, Order, or Assignment Requirements

Summarize and evaluate Dorothy A. Winsor’s “Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering.” You can find the article in at Engineering.Writing.pdf.

After summarizing Winsor’s thesis, main points, and conclusions, answer the following “Question for Evaluation”:

In studying engineers’ perceptions of the amount of writing that their jobs require, Winsor writes, “This study suggests that writing is, indeed, what engineers do. They inscribe a written representation of physical reality and then use more writing to build agreed-upon knowledge and their own characters as engineers. In inhabiting a world of language, engineers are not unique. Indeed, as I said in the opening of this article, they resemble the rest of us, just as our theories would predict. The engineer differs from the rest of us, perhaps, only in showing greater resistance to knowing that language mediates experience.” Do you agree or disagree that engineers “show greater resistance to knowing that language mediates experience”? How do you feel about the us/them binary that Winsor establishes in this piece, or do you think that she is fairly even handed?