Engineering Words: Communicating clearly in the workplace

✍ Scribed by Sharon Burton, Bonni Graham Gonzalez

• Publisher: XML Press
• Year: 2023
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 165
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Over the course of a career, every engineer needs to communicate, in both written and oral form, with other engineers and non-engineers. Yet, too many engineers never develop this basic skill. Engineering Words draws on the authors' extensive experience as technical communicators and teachers of a popular class in technical communication for engineers at the University of California, Riverside, to present a comprehensive introduction to communicating in the business world. This book covers everything from the basics of clear writing to résumés to cover letters to requirements documents to presentations and much more.

Engineering Words can be used as a textbook for classes that train engineers to be effective communicators. It can also serve as a self-study text that even experienced engineers will find useful for improving their communication skills.

✦ Table of Contents

Engineering Words Front Cover
Inside Cover
Copyright Notices
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Welcome
You can learn to communicate
Terms we use in this book
Who is this book for?
Chapter 2. Clear Communication Guidelines
Clear communication matters in the business world
The basics
What’s in a sentence?
Active voice
Present tense
Second person
Repetition
Reduce the reading level
User-focused, user-centric
Short is good
Short sentences
Short paragraphs
Short sections
Headings
Building sentences and paragraphs
Topic sentences
The rest of the paragraph
Example paragraph
Parsing the example
Chapter 3. The Business Context of Communication
Writing for professors/peer reviewers
Writing for your boss/business peers/the public
So what is the business context?
The financial context: the flow of money in a business
Revenue
COGS/variable costs
Gross profit
Overhead/GA/fixed costs
Net profit
Retained earnings
Communication in the context of the flow of money
Historical/technical context: prior art and problem-solving
Products solve problems
Personal context: the technology adoption curve
Innovators
Early adopters
The chasm
Early majority/pragmatists
Late majority/conservatives
Skeptics/laggards
Communicating in the context of solving problems
Practical application: the business case
Straight return on investment (ROI)
Cost avoidance
Chapter 4. Résumés and Cover Letters
Cover letters
Structure of a business letter
The addresses
The date and salutation
The body
The complimentary close
Telling your cover letter story
Résumés
The job search environment
Professional vs intern/first job résumés
Structure and content
Objective
Special skills
Work history
Education
Chapter 5. Flow of a Project in a Company
Project start
Business requirements
Functional and technical specification phases
Development (and testing) phase
Reality check meeting
Delivery phase
The Secret
Chapter 6. Designing Effective Presentations
Designing your slides
Some important terms
Title slides
Outlines
Slide structure
DO
DON’T
Text formatting
Font size
Font attributes
Font type
A last note about fonts and text
Colors
Contrast
Structure and emphasis
Setting mood
Graphs
Choose the correct graph type
Format the graph well
Spelling and grammar
Conclusion
Questions?
Chapter 7. Handling Yourself and the Room in Presentations
A day or two before the presentation
Right before the presentation
The presentation
Manage yourself while you talk
Use your body
Use your voice
It’s time for questions
Politics in presentations
Finishing up
Chapter 8. Human Cognition
About humans
The physical world and biology
Our vision
The world happens in human brains
Preattentive process
Attentive process
Combining preattentive with attentive
Standards are preattentive
Other processes
Cocktail party effect
Sensory adaptation
Learning theory
Experience
Schemas
Habits
Interference
Cognitive load
Humans require explanations
Chapter 9. Constructing Explanations
Explanations and our brains
Design and perception: visually explanations
Foundational concept: visual space on a page
Black space
Gray space
White space
Principle 1: perception is active, fast, and largely preattentive
Using Principle 1 when designing visual explanations
Principle 2: figure and ground
Using Principle 2 when designing visual explanations
Principle 3: grouping
Using Principle 3 when designing visual explanations
Document to the question: cognitively constructed explanations
What are the four user questions?
Why should I care?
What is it?
How do I do it?
Why did it do that?
Chapter 10. Personas and Scenarios
Why do you care?
You can’t develop for yourself or for everyone
What are preferred input modes?
How do I improve my communication using VARK?
V = Visual
A = Auditory
R = Reading
K = Kinesthetic
Input modes versus learning theory
Why should I care about input modes?
Personas
How do I create a persona?
How do I use a persona?
Scenarios
Requirements are implied
Wrong personas and wrong scenarios
What do you do with personas and scenarios?
Chapter 11. Writing Functional Specifications
The structure of a functional specification
User guides
Technical specifications
Functional specifications
Deconstructing functions and features
Writing functions and features
Priority
Description
What is it?
Why does [persona] want it?
How do we do it?
What can go wrong?
Action-result table
Business and functional requirements
Chapter 12. Testing Your Products
Organizational styles
Why test?
What is a defect?
What can be tested?
Risk analysis and its effect on testing
Calculating risk
Reporting defects
Creating test cases and test suites
Deconstructing test cases
What makes a good test case?
Test cases are like recipes
Structure of test cases
Writing test cases for functions and features
Test plan, suite, case naming and/or numbering
Description
What are you testing?
Why does [persona] need this to work?
How do you test this?
How do you know this feature or function passed the test?
Materials
Prerequisite tests
Action-result table
Target pass/fail
Appendix A. References
Bibliography
Index
Colophon
Back Cover