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Kaylee Harris

Professor Nathan Cole

English 1010

April 2018

How English Classes are beneficial for Electrical Engineers

Many students that are going into engineering fields don’t believe that you need to have

good English skills in order to be successful in that profession. My brother is one of them, and

my dad was once one of them too. My brother is going into an electronic profession too called

Computer Science, and he never saw a purpose for taking a technical writing class. He didn’t

know why it was required and said that the only writing he was good at was writing code.

Writing code is computer programming to communicate with a computer. Although it seems like

computer programming is all the skills someone would need for that, there’s more to it than that.

Electrical Engineers do some computer programming too. I’ve chosen to take a look at how

English skills benefit a Electrical Engineer at his job.

My father became an Electrical Engineer halfway through college when he was getting

his bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering. To become an Electrical Engineer, one must get

a bachelor’s degree in the profession. There are higher degrees in Electrical Engineering too. The

students in the programs for Electrical Engineering have to take a technical writing class as part

of their major too. The technical writing class is very important because the college graduates

need to have great writing skills while on the job.

The English courses that my dad took in college have benefitted him greatly. He says that

he has to write technical documents a lot explaining how electronic hardware will operate. These
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documents are to educate those who don’t have Electrical Engineering experience on how the

new devices work. If my dad never had to take those English courses in college, he wouldn’t

have the English skills to effectively communicate something complex into something simple.

He has an easier audience when the people he has to communicate to are engineers themselves

because they can both speak the same “technical language.” His other job as a Design Engineer

is harder in forms of communication because the audience he has to communicate with are

managers, directors, and consumers who don’t have this advanced knowledge of English. He has

to make his writing more understandable for them.

My dad works on new inventions that are becoming products, so he has to do a good job

explaining how it will work, look, and function to his audiences. He has to explain to other

engineers how something works and how to use the parts in their products. He has to draw

diagrams like flow charts and 3D CAD images so the audience can visualize the product in their

head. Sometimes he has to describe something that doesn’t exist yet.

My dad writes a lot of emails at his jobs and it is the most common way of

communication in engineering. Emails are the best idea of communication for Electrical

Engineers so that there is a paper trail. If everything was done verbally, then nothing would be

remembered correctly. The other things that require English skills are presentations and technical

documents. He builds a lot of presentations for the manufacturers to look at. The presentations

show market trends, forecasts, and information on his amount of customers. The technical

documents he has to produce are for the new designs that he is helping out with. In order for the

designs on the document to be approved, everything has to be accurate including time, steps, and
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how long and tricky each step will be. The technical documents he creates are about how a

device will function, and they are also called datasheets.

Here’s one excerpt from a datasheet he had to make:

“The Digital Bend Sensor [Part Number Range] is an easy to use low variability Bend

Sensor that provides an accurate high speed data stream through a 12C interface or SPI interface.

The Digital Bend Sensor is a product consisting of a plastic substrate coated with a resistive

material that changes in electrical conductivity as it is bent. Typically Bend Sensors must be

characterized because of the large manufacturing variabilities. The Digital Bend Sensor

eliminates the need to calibrate and delivers consistent and predictable performance.”

This is actual evidence of Electrical Engineers needing good writing skills in order to

successfully do their jobs. The next set of evidence comes from an article about an actual study

that some authors had conducted. It was to determine how much and how important writing is in

Electronic careers such as Electrical and Computer Engineering. They did surveys, polls, and

research to figure out what these new college graduates in these professions had encountered.

They also graphed out their findings. The graduates were also to describe how much of their time

at their job they are spending on the writing.

The introduction to this article, employers in the UK seemed to be unhappy with their

Electrical Engineering Graduates because of their lack of communication and writing skills.

They didn’t have a good knowledge of “technical writing and communication

skills”(Mohammed paragraph 1). I believe that this article correlates how Electrical Engineering

is everywhere without good English skills, especially when they mention how “Engineering

schools across the globe are responding” to these problems (Mohammed paragraph 2). “The
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communication demands” of Electrical Engineers have triggered a communication curriculum to

be placed in the “undergraduate Engineering” programs (Mohammed paragraph 2). The

programs were then reformed to include technical writing for the Engineering graduates.

A survey was then introduced to Electrical Engineers that worked in the United States,

finding that the Engineers believe that “strong communication skills as critical to both the hiring

and the promotion processes” (Mohammed paragraph 11). How good the English classes were in

college and how many the students had to take, greatly benefitted their career in Electrical

Engineering (Mohammed paragraph 19). They received extra benefits from their knowledge with

communication.

Authors had conducted surveys and polls to find out what type of communication

Electrical Engineers do on their jobs, how much of their time do they spend on it, and what types

of communication. The survey in the United States showed that “Electrical Engineers regardless

of their position within the organization, spend most of their workdays communicating”

(Mohammed paragraph 11). They got approximately 55% of the day communicating, and that is

not all (Mohammad paragraph 11). There are tasks like writing documents, oral presentations,

and meetings outside of the usual writing emails. There were some authors who came up with

calculation of the amount of time Engineers spent on doing certain writing tasks (Mohammed

paragraph 12). An example of a day to an Engineer is 32% writing, 10% on presentations, and

22% on discussions (Mohammed paragraph 12). The authors also graphed the amount of

respondents (Mohammed paragraph 19). They graphed the respondent characteristics, how much

of which specific writing task the Engineers do each day, and their experience (Mohammed

paragraph 19).
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The last source was written from a study based off of the “self-reports” from Electrical

Engineering graduates (Mohammed paragraph 46). The skills of communication in the Electrical

Engineering field tie into creativity steps like “communicating/selling a product” (Kortru,

Burkett, and Jackson paragraph 11). There are “designs presented,” “alternative design

solutions” and “defining needs” that Electrical Engineers have to worry about (Kortru, Burkett,

and Jackson paragraph 11). There are not just communication skills to worry about in this field

too, but other skills. There is designing and “decision-making” to a problem or solution (Kortru,

Burkett, and Jackson paragraph 11). In this career, graduates have to be very creative at work.

I never thought that English skills were this important to a career as electronic as this. It

seemed like my dad and my brother had always complained of English skills not being important

to their careers. It may have just been my brother because after I interviewed my dad, I’ve

learned that it is the complete opposite of what I thought and other students may have thought

too. English skills are very important especially in this career Electrical Engineering. There is a

lot of communication with everything when it comes to making products. There are real

graduates that have reported what the profession is actually like and there are other skills too, not

just communication although that still takes up a big portion.

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Works Cited:

Mohammed, Crista. ​Communicating in the Workplace: Self Reports by New UWI Electrical and

Computer Engineering Graduates. ​The West Indian Journal of Engineering, Vol.38, No. 2,

January 2016. Pp. 93-101.

Kortru, Sushma. Burkett, Susan. Jackson, David. ​Active and Collaborative Learning in an

Introductory Electrical and Computer Engineering Course.​ JGE: The Journal of General

Education, Vol. 59, No. 4, 2010.

Harris, Joseph. Interview