"Joining the Engineering Community: How Do Novices Learn to Write Like Engineers?"

There are a series of questions that Dorothy A. Winsor focuses on. "How and when do novice employees learn to write effectively?" "Do they learn to write via models or mentoring?" "Do they learn in their technical writing courses in school what they need to know to write effectively on the job?" "Or are there aspects of technical writing that can be learned only at work?" Winsor goes on to answer these questions from a series of survey questions. To answer her questions, Winsor's finds that 53% of the senior students in engineering school say they learned to write effectively through the use of models, 38% from supervisors, 24% from co-workers, 14% from a writing class they were required to take their freshman year, 7% high school training, 5% from classes at work, and 5% from work evaluations. She finishes off her article with six questions that are not conformable with the answers she received from her first survey. The six questions are, "How do novices select models? How do they recognize a goo model?" "What areas do they consciously attend to in imitating a good model?" "Do they use models early in the writing process, with consequences for invention, or late in the process, with consequences primarily for shaping?" "How do they know when they've done a good job of imitating a model? Do their supervisors agree on which imitations are successful?" "How local is the knowledge they gain from models? Will it transfer to other companies or departments?" "Which imitated areas seem most central to their roles as engineers and employees?" This particular article was written mainly for an audience of engineers. Readers like myself became bored shortly after reading this. I feel that what Winsor wrote was interesting in trying to find out how novice writers learn to write effectively, but it was too narrow of a topic. It was too narrow of a topic because there are plenty of jobs, like law enforcement, where the writing can become even more strenuous. However, I do enjoy reading about how people learn to imitate writing. Any novice in any form of writing must learn quickly to become more successful with their writing.

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