One of the most frequent things we hear from audiences – both of reports and presentations – who fail to engage with and understand the content being communicated is: “What’s the story?” It may seem like an odd request, since engineering communication may not seem …
For the engineers that I have taught, one of the most challenging communication tasks is explaining scientific concepts to less technical audiences, such as the general public. Yet explaining their work to the public – and other audiences with varying levels of technical know how …
Figure 1: Goleman’s Emotional Competencies
Most would agree that emotional intelligence (EI) is essential to effectively managing and participating in teams, which is a key aspect of engineering work. Yet it’s not often taught in an engineering curriculum or discussed in the workplace. In her IEEE ProComm 2015 conference …
Consider engineering as an act of translation, generating and applying different representations (words, models, equations, diagrams, etc.) to the practices of design and problem solving. The engineer perpetually moves between the world of theory and reality, and each step in between requires translation. As they …
By Lydia Wilkinson
Oral presentations can strike fear into the hearts of many an engineer. This discomfort is something all actors have had to deal with at some point, and that the discipline has developed strategies to address. Performers think of their body and voices as …
In her internationally best-selling book, Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, advises women to “speak your truth” but to do so in an appropriate, yet non-threatening way—to be “not brutally honest but delicately honest.” As …
Ethics has long been acknowledged as central to engineering education; yet current approaches to teaching engineering ethics fail to understand the the psychological and philosophical literature about how ethics are learned. The three dominant modes may be identified as:
The ethical theories approach: Akin to approaches …
In engineering teams, gender dynamics can disproportionately impact women, limiting or circumscribing their roles in those team environments. At our last conference in Madison, Joanna Wolfe – Director of the Global Communication Center, Teaching Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University – discusses how gender dynamics can create …
Listen to George Hayhoe interview the three guest editors of the IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication special issue on Plain Language – Nataliya Mateeva, Michelle Moosally, and Russell Willerton – as they discuss the role, the history, and the future of plain language in professional …
Traci-Nathans Kelly, former editor of our IEEE Professional Communication Society book series, is interviewed by The Engineering Career Coach’s Anthony Fasano about her book, co-authored with Christine G. Nicometo, Slide Rules: Design, Build, and Archive Presentations in the Engineering and Technical Fields.
Listen here to get some …
