Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering

Abstract

struction of knowledge has become increasingly accepted by those of us in the humanities and social sciences. We talk, therefore, of language, and particularly written language, as a tool for constructing ideas, of a given field of knowledge being created by the interaction of its practitioners' texts, and of knowledge itself, including scientific knowledge, as rhetorically shaped. (See, for instance, Lefevre; Bruffee; Nelson et al.; and Latour, Science in Action.) We accept the idea that our knowledge is shaped by our language. But this view of language and writing is not necessarily accepted in other parts of our campuses, as those of us who teach engineers, for example, can attest. Engineering defines itself as a field concerned with the production of useful objects. In keeping with this concern, engineers tend not only to see their own knowledge as coming directly from physical reality without textual mediation, but also to devalue the texts engineers themselves produce, seeing them as simple write-ups of information found elsewhere.