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<< IMPROVE YOUR WRITING
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Communication for
Engineering Students
writing and speaking skills for science and engineering
Are science and engineering students in special need of help
with their writing skills? This seems to be a generally held belief, and
John Davies takes it as the starting-point for this manual. His approach
is to divide the writing task into discrete topics, each of which he treats in separate chapters.
He covers Sentences, Grammar and Style, Technical Information, Laboratory
Reports, Projects, and even Spoken Presentations, Job Applications, and
Interview Techniques. The general approach is to offer sound, sensible
advice, and he points out that there are few absolute rules. The way to
improve your writing, he suggests, is "to think about what you write". This is good advice, in whichever branch of engineering [or science] it might be applied.
He offers brief exercises (with answers) in each chapter, and I would
guess that a first or second-year engineering student would find his avuncular tone reassuring. However, some sections - those on word-processors and examinations for instance - skip over the issues rather rapidly.
In this sense the strength of a book which covers so many topics in
such a short space could also be construed as its weakness. However, on
balance I suspect that the students at whom it is aimed are likely to be
overwhelmed by a more encyclopaedic approach. Davies' light touch should
encourage them to adopt good practices and pursue the finer details in
further reading which is given at the end of each chapter.
© Roy Johnson 1997
[more COMMUNICATION SKILLS books]
John W. Davies, Communication for Engineering Students,
London: Longman, 1996, pp.167, ISBN 0582256488
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