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Advice from Engineers
 Getting advice from your parents about relationships is probably a wise move. After all, they've been through it. Taking advice from a chef about how to build house is a different story entirely. What type of expertise is a chef offering that's better than what a carpenter could offer?
Of course, this stands out as common sense. Even still, many engineering students turn to the wrong places for advice. Instead of asking advice straight from the proverbial horse's mouth in successful engineers, they instead choose to check out generic ad hoc information due to its abundance and convenience.
This is a bad move for multiple reasons. If you want legitimate engineering advice, then ask an engineer. In this article, we'll cover a few topics where you can read advice directly from successful engineers.
Logical Presentation
For engineering students, there's sometimes a tendency to simply throw work together as it's completed and to hand it over in a panic. For this reason, many engineering professors say that a large percentage of the work they receive from students contains writing that doesn't have a logical flow. It's choppy, poorly edited and, apart from facts and figures, incoherent.
What they mean by this is that the writing turned in doesn't present any congruity in the ideas.
To present your presentations logically, summarize the entire process on paper. This means writing down the steps you took, and how you reached your conclusion, and also tying it in together logically and coherently. Make sure everything's in order. Don’t start with the conclusion. This isn't a Quentin Tarantino movie.
Understanding Your Purpose and Audience
A lot of engineering students don't make good writers. That's okay, though; you don't have to be a great writer to write well enough to impress your professor and earn a good mark. You only have to understand your purpose and your audience.
First, take a look at your purpose. What exactly are you writing about? This should help you adjust your rhetoric and lean it toward explaining only what you need to explain. This is technical work, not fiction. It's important that you understand the purpose of your paper is your project and not the prose.
Next, understand your audience. Who's reading the paper you write? This isn't a piece for a writing contest. You don't need to wax poetic. Simply understand that you're writing for engineers and use the logical presentation tips to formulate your documents so that they're clearly represented.
Writing Structure
There's an industry-standard structure to engineering writing. Like it or not, this is what's expected throughout the culture. Anything less or anything extra is going to result in a poorly received assignment. You didn't make these rules, obviously, but you do have to adhere to them.
The best way to learn how to write is not to take any English lit course. It's all about focusing on other documents turned in by other engineers. Check out various magazines, editorials, and other projects that engineers write. You’ll learn how to comprehend the structure and you can then emulate this style.
The Creative Spark
As previously mentioned, this isn’t fiction writing. Any type of prose containing personal stories, fictional characters, or even something as trite as an attempt at humor, will result in poor marks. Engineers are the upmost professionals and all professors are going to take the writing very seriously.
That being said, however, there is still plenty of room for creativity in engineering writing. Believe it or not, creativity is greatly appreciated and will be very well received.
Analogies and metaphors are always in high demand. If you can liken your project to something else in life that's relatable, then you'll score big points for originality. Also, if you show the moralistic side of technology, or even expose its limits and potential threats without becoming fictional with the project, then that's even better.
There's a lot of room for the creative writer in engineering. You just have to veer toward reality and always remain logical.
Achieving the Logical Flow
In order to structure a logical flow in your engineering writing, it's important that you approach your paper as you would your project. A quick example, as told by a writer, would be to structure your chapters as you structure your project. Start with an introduction of the project as a whole, speaking of how you got to a conclusion instead of giving the conclusion away.
Next, formulate the various steps you took and make sure they’re highly detailed. If you had any revelations along or way or sought guidance from another source, then be sure to conclude everything in its proper order – the way it happened.
The information has to be in the correct order. You start with a summary, proceed through your steps, and end by reaching your conclusion.
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