Writing for the Non-Writer

I’m an engineer. Graduated from Rochester Institute of Technology with a BS in Mechanical Engineering in 1993. 10 year plan, having taken a shortcut through 2 years of music school and 4 years in the Navy. I don’t necessarily recommend that path, but a lot of 18 year olds don’t know what they want to do with the rest of their lives, and this plan did really help in that regard.

The “plan” out of high school was to become a musician.  Kids never really know what they are getting themselves into, and that was doubly true of me. After two years of music school, I became impatient and joined the Navy as a musician. The one thing that did for me was to demonstrate that music was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t any way to make a living, so after the Navy, I went to engineering school. Fortunately that plan stuck.

We’re really here to talk about writing, but to do that, I have to describe how I became a non-writer. Engineers are typically not word people. We are number people, and graphical/geometrical people. It’s hard for most of us to put our thoughts into sentences that make sense to people who make a living working with words. This is not a revelation to anyone, most of us are lucky to be able to spell our own names. This is kind of unfortunate, because, well, try to read problem descriptions on the SolidWorks forum some time, and you’ll see why very quickly. Lots of words, but very little meaning, or words that don’t have any specific meaning. You see a lot of engineers who can’t describe things very well, or even put down a stream of events in sequential or logical order.

When I was a kid, like maybe third grade, I wrote a story about getting lost in space in a spaceship. I’m not sure how you’d go about getting lost in space, you can see things for huge distances. But my characters were lost in space. I was crushed when I got a not-stellar grade on the story. I continued to write in high school, but my grades for writing never improved. I wrote a lot of letters (you kids will have to imagine the old fashioned practice of writing pages of actual manuscript with a pen on lined paper) to friends. I understood the rules of grammar, and I could spell, but I just couldn’t put the ideas together. Later I understood that a lot of my problems with what they called “reading comprehension” was that I couldn’t parrot back what the teacher told us Shakespeare or Poe mean by a certain phrase.

Even in college, my writing was stilted and wooden because all the stuff I read was high 18th and 19th century stuff. I thought big words meant good writing. I tried to loosen up by writing a piece about a mouse on the floor of my dorm room running from pizza box to pizza box. At least I didn’t take my continuing failure too seriously.

At some point I just had to face it – I wasn’t a writer. A lot of people are smarter than I am, and have given up on writing much earlier. I kept wasting time on it. I kept a journal through my late 20s that now is painful to read. I’m just establishing that like a lot of engineers out there, I had no special skill when it came to writing.

But as engineers, even though our main communication tools are charts and graphs and drawings,  we have a daily need to communicate through written words. We have to write specifications and reports, describe problems, write procedures, and so on. Writing isn’t really just grammar and spelling, it’s mainly about organizing your thoughts. If there’s one thing we’re supposed to learn in college, it’s how to organize our thoughts.

I think the first bit of writing that I did that really started to betray the idea that I wasn’t a complete moron was in my second engineering job, working as the only mechanical engineer in a startup pressure sensor company. We were getting ISO9000 certified, so it was up to me to write some specifications and procedures. Even if I was never good at it, I did at least enjoy writing.

When it came down to it, I learned to do technical writing by making outlines. Outlines are a structured type of writing that helps you organize your thoughts. Organize thoughts from general to specific. It also helps you prioritize the ideas that you are writing about, or to list them in some sort of order, by size, chronologically, prioritized, etc.

The big headers, say the A, B, C ideas are often in some order, such as:

1. importance/priority
2. sequential/chronological

Then under the big headers, say the A.1, you start thinking about the first detail that you have to deal with under that particular heading, and you get as detailed as you need with additional subheaders A.1.a.i, or whatever scheme you are using.

In writing the ISO documentation, I spent a lot of time on outlines. If ideas don’t flow in an outline, it’s pretty obvious, and one of the great things about outlines is that they are so easy to reorganize.

Then when you actually have to write prose, you just follow the outline. Don’t get ahead of yourself, don’t repeat yourself unnecessarily, and don’t get off track. If it’s not in your outline, it’s not important. Sometimes you can just take the bullets from the outline and rephrase them directly into real sentences. The headings and subheadings even help you create some sort of paragraph structure, so that related ideas are grouped together. Outlining writing is a brilliant approach for engineers, who tend to think logically, but just can’t string together a narrative that sounds understandable.

The really hard part is putting sentences together in a way that means only one thing. I’m just going to give you some of the rules I’ve made up for myself to try to write more clearly and understandably. In spoken language you have the ability to add inflection to your voice to help steer the meaning, but in written language, you’ve got to deal with the other person’s imagination, and the fact that they might put things together differently than you have.

Missing words

This is a simple thing, and everybody does it, including me. But when you do it, you’re destroying the meaning of your writing. You’re tapping away, writing the best sentence ever, when suddenly, you leave out a word. “Fred went to moon.” Was Fred A) in a rocket ship B) headed to see a Korean friend C) Russian, or D) lowering his pants? We really don’t know.

Spelling

In general, I don’t count spelling as a valuable skill. Until it starts interfering with how you communicate ideas. Their, They’re and There all sound the same, but replace one with another in a sentence, you’re sure to confuse somebody. Part of spelling a word right is making sure you know what you’re trying to say, and that you’re saying the correct thing. When spelling actually changes the meaning of sentence, you’ve got real problems. Spelling a word like “occasionally” wrong hardly matters, since you can’t screw that word up so badly that it looks like something else. But as we saw on the form recently, “form”, “from” and “fomr” are not interchangeable. Or the word “here” when it’s supposed to be “there”. These are the times when spelling is very important.

Pronouns

A sentence where you use use a generic word to refer to someone specific can have a lot of different meanings, and this leads to confusion, or worse. When possible, I try to avoid pronouns (you, I, they, etc) and instead use a specific name or title. For example, “Matt and John went to the door. Then he went through it.” Who went through the door? “They were going to the store.” Who is “they”? In our gender-fearful world, we sometimes replace gender specific pronouns with gender neutral pronouns, even when inappropriate. “They” could mean Matt and John or just Matt or just John, or even someone else mentioned in an earlier sentence. So when you’re writing, try to be specific, or when you use pronouns, make sure there is no possible double meaning.

Commas and phrasing

One of the things that drives me crazy in writing is when you have a sentence where you can group words different to come up wildly different meanings. Sometimes the use of commas can help you group ideas, but people tend to over use commas, and either add or remove meaning where it should or shouldn’t be. This often happens because you have run-on sentences, with too many thoughts at the same time. Often just separating the thoughts by making a new sentence can help you get through this mess.

Apostrophes

Apostrophes aren’t meant for plurals. When you add one, you really change the meaning of a word, and thus a sentence. Like this one: “Frank’s burned.” That can mean that Frank’s house burned, or that Frank is burned. Both of those usages are correct with the apostrophe, and that’s confusing enough. But if the apostrophe is incorrect, it could mean that you burned several hot dogs. Use apostrophes for contractions (Frank is burned = Frank’s burned) and possessive (Frank’s house burned). This is a simple enough thing that is worth getting right. The exception is “its” when something belongs to it. That’s a possessive, but for some reason doesn’t get the apostrophe.

Slang and Fad Usage

“What went down” can mean “What happened” or “what fell”. This is sometimes an age thing, but mostly, its just sloppy language. “It’s all down to Larry” and “it’s all up to Larry” appear to mean opposite things, but they really just mean the same thing to different people. In engineering writing, you should never fall into the trap of writing or reading by applying fad usage.

Multiple meanings

“Matt missed the show and went fishing on Wednesday.” This sentence is unclear about when the show was, or if the show and going fishing happened on the same day. I don’t know what this is called, but it’s the cause of a lot of misunderstandings. Especially in technical writing, you have to be clear about things.You can’t assume that people understand what you say. You might rewrite this as “On Tuesday, Matt missed the show. On Wednesday, he went fishing.”

Proofread your own stuff

One thing that annoys me is when I read a professional journalist’s news article, and I can find these errors in that kind of writing. Yes, they know better, but everybody makes mistakes. Everybody needs to at least proof read your own stuff. In writing this blog, I wind up fixing all sorts of errors, many of which are on this list, just by looking at the words a second time. You don’t need to pay a fancy editor, but you, or someone you trust, should take a look at any professional writing you do. By simply re-reading your own writing you can catch and fix 70% of your errors. That easily makes it worth doing.

I know that by writing something about the rules of writing, I’m setting myself up as a huge target, but whatever criticism comes my way is kind of my point: I’m not a real writer. I only get away with doing this because the proliferation of blogs enables amateur writers to still write, and for the book, it takes a raft of editors to float that boat.

I should avoid giving examples, because my writing certainly isn’t perfect. I’m sure this blog post itself is full of the type of errors I’m criticizing (and many more). But that should give the non-writers out there courage to try. I’m clearly a non-writer, and yet some people know me as a writer (the difference between a blogger and a journalist?!?)

Start with an outline. Organize your thoughts. Make sure you know at least the big rules for writing and grammar. I don’t worry about some of the more esoteric things like passive voice and split infinitives. I do worry about errors that can change the meaning or give multiple meanings.