Gary Baker
Nancy Buffington
English 550
21 May 1997
Advanced Jargon In Engineering Communication
What is engineering? Most people would have problems answering
this question. Sure everybody knows an engineer or has heard of engineering.
A lot of people know that engineering is science and math related, pays
very well, and is a relatively complex field, but what else do they know?
Most people know very little more about the profession. Even other
students that I've encountered majoring in the field of engineering are
unsure of just exactly what engineering is. I am in no way suggesting
that engineering is some incomprehensible, foreign, or rare field.
The point that I am trying to make is that people are always asking, "what
exactly is engineering?" The question is raised in engineering far more
than other fields such as history or biology. So what exactly is
engineering? Engineering is "the art of the practical application
of scientific and empirical knowledge to the design, production or accomplishment
of various parts of construction projects, machines, and material of use
or value to men" (Mayne and Margolis 4). Basically meaning that engineering
uses science and known knowledge to invent products that are beneficial
to society.
Now that we have a relatively general definition
of engineering, let's discuss the specialists in the field, the engineers.
Engineers are innovators that use science, existing knowledge, math and
nature to make better or new items. Items ranging from a golf club
that enables you to hit farther with less of a swing, to a calculator that
is capable of figuring out the most difficult of problems. Problems
that take mathematicians hours to do take these new calculators seconds
to do. These two examples are general because engineering covers invention
in every technological field. Engineers cover such a wide range of
specialties that no one engineer can understand the work of every other
engineer. One may be dealing with the manufacturing of better shoes,
while the other is working on nuclear weapons.
With all this knowledge and range in the field of
engineering it is obvious why communication to other engineering specialties,
and the layman is so complex. Engineers have so much to say but a
very little audience to communicate with that will understand them.
A text that I discovered helps to portray this lacking relationship between
the lay audience and the engineer when it says:
Engineers are erudite, intelligent, experienced. They
have a big vocabulary and are good at chatting informally with one another.
They have a knowledge and experience of fascinating projects. But
when it comes to putting these ideas over publicly, especially to a lay
audience, they often feel worried. They can be heard to be confused,
difficult to understand, rambling (Scott 5).
If we do not specialize in engineering , we are definitely an outsider
to the language. There may be information from an engineer that you
understand, but full comprehension is impossible due to the technicality
of the language. This quote helps to explain my point, "There is
one range
of words which everybody uses daily. They are words familiar
both to the specialist and to layperson. There is a further range
of words which engineers can use with one another - words which they do
use with one another every day- but which are not familiar to the layman.
These are word's in the engineer's jargon" (Scott 69). Words in the
engineer's jargon are used to speak with other engineers for communication
at work and in written work such as journals.
I found a very complex journal that was written
for only specialized engineers. To prove the complexity of the engineering
field to a lay audience, I presented a quote to a small audience from this
engineering journal. The title of the journal is "Space Vector PWM
Techniques with Minimum Switching Losses and a Variable Pulse Rate." The
journal article is a collaborated work by three very well respected and
experienced engineers. The article is very detailed with examples,
graphs and advanced calculus problems. There are a total of twenty
five recent references, showing us the complexity of the article.
The article is set up with an abstract, introduction, experimental results
and a conclusion. The abstract, which gives other engineers a brief
summary of the article reads, and this is the quote I used in my presentation:
A novel randomized control strategy for three phase voltage
source inverters, based on the voltage space vectors, is described.
An implicit asymmetrical modulating function results in switching losses
in the inverter being reduced by about half in comparison with those using
the classic space vector pulse width modulation (PWM) method. The
pulse rate is varied within individual sixty degrees sectors of the vector
plane, so that the power spectra of the output voltage are spread over
a wide frequency range and acquire a continuous part. The relevant
theoretical analysis, computer simulations, and experimental results are
presented
(Trzynadlowski, Kirlin, Legowski 173).
Needless to say members of my audience became confused and bored or maybe
confused and interested. The complexity of this abstract is enough
to let any "nonengineer" know that they have picked up the wrong journal
or have the Spanish version of it. In a communication book
for engineers I found this very interesting sentence, "Engineers are
often surprised by the extent to which they can be misunderstood or even,
apparently, ignored" (Scott 5). The material they present such as
in the abstract is very easy to misunderstand and ignore. The technicality
of the
engineering language makes even the simplest of tasks impossible to
explain in layman's terms.
Is this confusion and difficulty of a lay audience's ability to understand
the language of engineering the fault of the engineer? An engineer
takes years of college and on the job experience to be able to understand
and communicate with the engineering jargon proficiently. The tasks
of engineers can only be explained in complicated terms, that for the most
part, only other engineers in that specific field will understand.
James Boyd White explains this thoroughly speaking of the complicated profession
of law when he says, "It is common for a
nonlawyer to feel that legal language is in a deep sense foreign: not
only are its terms incomprehensible, but its speakers seem to have available
to them a repertoire of moves that are denied to the rest of us" (247).
The same holds true for the nonengineer when hearing or reading the work
of an engineer. We are not exactly denied the ability to understand
these complicated professions, we may just not choose to specialize in
the given field. By choosing not to specialize in a given field we
leave ourselves ignorant to the knowledge that the field has to offer.
It is impossible to specialize in every field no matter how intelligent
an individual is. Engineering language may sound as complicated as
a foreign language.
Learning the language of an engineer is also like
learning a foreign language, such as English or German. There are
rules to follow and always possibilities to improve yourself and your vocabulary.
The engineering language takes both years of intense schooling and job
experience to learn. Once you understand the language there are shortcuts,
such as acronyms, that make communication in the work place faster.
Acronyms such as CFM (Continuous Flow Manufacturing) and PM (Preventive
Maintenance) even make it difficult for engineers, not in a certain specialty,
to understand the language. The divisions are not just among civil,
electrical, industrial, etc.. Acronyms make divisions in these specified
fields. What I mean is that two industrial engineers from two different
plants can have trouble understanding each other because of the specialized
language in each work environment. These different vocabularies with
in a specialized field only further difficult the already complicated language
of engineering.
It is impossible to deny the difficulties of professional
discourse within the field of engineering. Other fields may be able
to get by with out the language but with engineering this is impossible.
The preciseness of the field calls for supremacy of the language to be
the most effective worker. Language is both power and necessity.