Here’s an image I can get behind: a dog with graph and chart!
Check out the latest Prism magazine, published by the American Society for Engineering Education, to read more about how engineering educators are helping students improve their written and oral communication skills.
Thomas K. Grose, in …
Getting a job involves more than just updating your resume!
As part of my Professional and Technical Communication course at Rose-Hulman, I ask students to revise their current resume and job application letter to target a particular job and company. For many students, the notion of …
Don’t be alarmed–this is an actual sighting of an engineer reading!
I was very pleased to read G. Pascal Zachary’s Opinion piece in the November 2012 issue of the IEEE Spectrum magazine. Yes, fiction has an important role to play in inspiring creativity among the engineering set. In fact, …
Teaching communication to engineers looks a lot like conducting an orchestra.
On Monday, November 26th, we started a new academic term here at Rose-Hulman, my home institution. That means I met with students in the two sections of the Technical and Professional Communication course that I …
Normally, watching a segment of 60 Minutes is a bit of mind candy for me. There are some interesting facts, a little nice storytelling, and perhaps I’m made to think a little bit more about something that I had not pondered before.
But on the November …
You can turn each of these nouns into a verb, but do so at your own peril!
I thought I would recommend Helen Sword’s recent posting in the NYT Draft column on the topic of mutant verbs. Be warned–the creation of verb forms from nouns doesn’t make our …
Ben Yagoda has provided more information on the m-dash in today’s New York Times. I am pleased that my own ramblings on the subject in a previous blog inspired others to explore this dainty bit of punctuation goodness!
To engineer is to write.
I was reminded recently about the amount of time working engineers spend on communication. As Jon Leydens explained in his 2008 PCS Transactions article,
“engineers spend between 20% and 40% of their workday writing, a figure that increases as they move up the career …
I need this t-shirt!
I am ready to confess: I do care a lot about the Oxford comma. The purpose of this post is to make you care too.
The Oxford comma, or “serial comma,” is meant to separate three or more items that appear in a …
Calling communication a “soft skill” implies that it’s easier, less technical, and of reduced value.
Recently the phrase “soft skills” created a heated debate among the members of the PCS AdCom. The question was, should communication be referred to as one of the “soft skills,” or …
