To Win New Business, Engineers Need Writing Skills
“Most of the fundamental ideas of science are essentially simple, and may, as a rule, be expressed in a language comprehensible to everyone.”
Winning clean energy proposals requires clear, concise, and compelling writing. Unfortunately, colleges are not teaching engineers to write well.
Oh no! It is 10:00 PM, and I am just getting to read my engineer's proposal. Our offer to build a solar energy project on the town's landfill is due by 9:00 AM. This morning, our CEO told me that we must win this project to achieve our revenue goals and keep our staff fully employed.
Yet, as I look at the document on my desk, I know that the town’s evaluators will not understand this proposal, nor will they put the grueling effort into reading the paragraph-long sentences filled with technical jargon and mind-numbing and unexplained acronyms.
I am angry. I will now be forced to stay up late to rewrite this impenetrable text.
I am also frustrated that we cannot find and hire engineers who know how to write well. As I reflect on my physics and engineering education in college, I recall that most of my classmates did not take literature and writing classes. Persuasive writing is considered a "soft" skill compared to the "hard" skill of evaluating data, graphs, and equations.
Look at the writing of science and engineering professors. It is often dreadful and not a model for eager students who want to gain marketable skills for their careers. For example, I randomly picked the first energy-industry paper I searched on Elsevier, an academic paper distributor. The following text is the first sentence of the paper's abstract.
Distributed Energy Resources in Local Integrated Energy Systems: Optimal Operation and Planning reviews research and policy developments surrounding the optimal operation and planning of DER in the context of local integrated energy systems in the presence of multiple energy carriers, vectors, and multi-objective requirements.
Did you read all that sentence? Did you understand it? Would you pay the required $130 fee to read the full paper? The answer is probably no, no, and no.
And this type of writing style hurts scientists who hope for prestige when other researchers cite their manuscripts. In a recent New York Times article, Are You Confused by Scientific Jargon? So are Scientists., a study of 21,000 scientific manuscripts showed "that papers containing higher proportions of jargon in their titles and abstracts were cited less frequently by other researchers."
How do we get engineers to write for a broader audience — persuading prospective customers, investors, and permitting agencies that their ideas should be selected and approved?
The first step is to demand that colleges require writing courses for graduation. These classes should not be technical writing courses, which may reinforce technical thinking, but instead, students should expand their minds to learn how to write persuasive essays from the English department.
Writing well is hard intellectual work. Good writing requires repeated editing to clarify the writer's ideas and convey the idea's meaning to a reader. The text must be engaging to keep the reader's interest from the first to the last sentence. To simplify the text and hone a compelling message is iterative and not just "cranked out" in one writing session. Without the hard work to write and rewrite, the engineer's ideas will lay dormant on unread pages.
Some people argue that engineers are incapable of writing. Therefore, businesses must hire marketing experts to translate an engineer's text. The fallacy in this approach is that inexperienced industry copywriters rely on meaningless slogans, like "we offer an end-to-end solution." What does this phrase mean? Only the engineers who developed the proposed solution can write the unique, compelling offer that has meaning.
In the clean energy industry, we must convince people to transition from buying electricity generated from dirty fossil fuels like coal and oil to purchasing renewable energy powered by the sun or wind. We must also convince people to buy new electrical appliances like heat pumps to replace old oil furnaces for home heating.
All transitions require changing past practices, never an easy or quick process. Convincing prospective buyers to make this change starts with engineers and scientists writing "in a language that is comprehensible to everyone." People only make a change that they understand.