(archived links not updated)

Academic Communication in English

Tools, Guidelines and Support for Research and Technology Transfer

1. Clarify the type of text you plan to write

The tools and links we recommend will mention different types of articles and documents. Before starting to read advice, it’s important to know the names and categories of the types of writing you’re planning. Follow these three simple steps:

Step 1: Make a brief visit to the main menu of types of writing from the engineering department of Colorado State University in the USA. This list will suggest many basic document types.

Step 2: Look at the full range of writing for one engineering field by consulting Table 1 of the following research article. The table gives an excellent overview of different genres and their purposes in computer engineering. The ‘Dissemination’ and ‘Evaluation (Reviews)’ sections will be of most interest to publishing academics.

Orr T. Genre in the field of computer science and computer engineering. IEE Transactions on Professional Communication. 1999;41(1);32-7

Step 3: Analyze your own field’s writing briefly

• Pick up two of the most important journals in your field. Look at the tables of contents to form an idea of relevant article types.
• Consult the Instructions (or Guidelines) to Authors of the same journals. They usually list the types of articles that can be submitted.

2.Publishing Your Research in Peer-Reviewed Journals

Comprehensive ‘How-to-Write’ textbooks online
Personal preferences and learning styles dictate which one of the many ‘how-to’ manuals, handbooks, or writing guides an engineer will prefer. We’ve looked at a number of online ones with a technical writer’s needs in mind. We can recommend these two.

• Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing. The extensive hyperlinking of this online handbook is a strong feature because you can reach information quickly on any concept that is unfamiliar to you or on a communication weakness you’ve identified. To start exploring this handbook, look at the advice on writing a clear problem statement, with examples of transformations from weak to strong writing. Another recommendation: we think the discussion of writing for different audiences is efficient but complete.
  
• Online Technical Writing Textbook. This more linear textbook (author: David A. McMurrye) has accompanied courses taught at Brooklyn College (City University of New York) and Austin Community College in Texas.

        
Tips for research writing, by article sections
Many article types and other documents contain similarly structured sections. Caution: While writing your article, always look at your target journal to see how the best authors combine the ‘standard’ sections. There is considerable variety between engineering disciplines in the way they fit the basic elements together.

• University of Toronto engineering faculty’s communication program website gives concise advice on many sections. The tips cover structure, phrasing, and approaches to difficult questions, section by section. We particularly recommend these sections:
  
  
  • Introductions — Read about the classic structure. Then observe specific examples in your own target journal.
    
  • Conclusions. The advice includes a useful discussion of the differences between introduction-type sentences and conclusion-type sentences, with a view to avoiding redundancy and enhancing coherence.
    
  • Literature reviews. Although aimed at researchers who are still working on a thesis, these tips can also help more experienced researchers write the introduction and discussion sections of articles. Caution: Inexperienced writers often include too much background literature in their papers. For publication, include only what’s necessary to frame your own project.
  
  
• The Massachusetts Institute of Technology writing center offers advice on sections in student essay writing. Some of the advice is applicable to professional academic writing of editorials, opinion articles, or magazine contributions. The MIT discussion of conclusions can be recommended.
  
• The Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing can also be used to learn about writing section-by-section. Use the hyperlinks in the table of contents.

        
Tips for research writing, by specific fields
The writing center at Colorado State University in the USA gives advice for the following fields:

• Civil engineering  
• Electrical engineering
• Mechanical engineering

The also have a good main menu of types of writing :

Tips on citing and documenting sources
Readers become confused when the boundaries between a writer’s ideas and those already in the literature aren’t clear because of misconceptions about how to use references. Furthermore, if misplacement is complicated by the use of cut–paste ‘composition’ of a text, the writer is vulnerable to accusations of plagiarism even if sources have been cited. We’ve seen publication delayed because of cut–paste writing and article acceptances revoked by journals because too much of it has been detected late in the editorial process.

• The University of Toronto engineering faculty’s website has good information for correcting misconceptions, gives good examples, and discusses differences between disciplines. Our recommendations:
  
  
  • Citing systems in different engineering fields: Discussion of how to distinguish ‘common knowledge’ (which doesn’t need citation) from statements that ‘invite debate’ (which does need citation). Caution: We’ve seen that too much ‘common knowledge’ in a research article introduction or discussion makes the work seem out of date (or similar to student writing). If information is really common knowledge, it may not be necessary in your research article, though it might be necessary in a magazine article or a consultancy report.
    
  • Excellent practices for interweaving information from bibliographic sources together with your own ideas and data  from an engineer’s point of view. The examples are at the researcher’s level even though students are addressed. Where it says ‘students have lost their degrees’ over plagiarism, you can interpret ‘editors have revoked acceptance of research papers’.
    
  • IEEE journal in-text citing conventions are unusual. See this explanation of their system.

• Reference management software will make correct citing easier. It helps in three ways:


1. It keeps your bibliographic information in a database that links to your word processor.
2. It automatically generates a reference list as you choose items from the database to cite in your text.
3. It formats the reference list for different journals. Caution: This feature is usually imperfect—the format of references in the list should be checked manually on the last draft.

The UPC Library offers the citing software RefWorks. Other well-known programs are EndNote, Reference Manager and Pro-Cite.
Caution: Before submitting the manuscript to a journal, be sure to remove the hyperlinking as it will cause problems for peer reviewers and editors. Keep the last version of the manuscript with the hyperlinks intact for yourself too, as you’ll need it when making post-review revisions.         

Tips on managing co-authoring

Engineers and scientists work and write in teams. The most prestigious research centers give within-department peer review before a paper is submitted. However, writers at many universities complain that co-authors give little feedback, but then journals’ peer reviewers give brutal criticism. We find that presenting a specific task to pre-submission readers or co-authors improves a writer’s chance of getting useful, focused feedback. Presenting a task seems to reduce the level of stress readers feel when they’re asked to give opinions to writers they know.

• How to give feedback.GeorgeMasonUniversity in the USA provides a list of rules to follow and questions to consider for co-authors.
  
• Reflect on the effectiveness of your draft with this list of short questions and invite your co-authors to do the same. From the computer science and engineering department of the University of California at San Diego.
  
• Guide to the critical reading of engineering research. A writer needs to be an astute, critical reader. Subject your own article to critical scrutiny with co-authors. Guidelines from William G. Griswold, University of California at San Diego.

        
Publishing tips in Spanish

The website of Juan Miguel Campanario has advice and scientific publication information in Spanish. The author, at the physics faculty of the Universidad de Alcalá de Henares, says, ‘El peor castigo para un investigador no es que las revistas rechacen sus artículos; … el indicio más evidente de fracaso científico, es que nadie lea, cite, utilice o valore sus artículos....’

3. Consultancy and Workplace Communication

Engineers write many documents for industry, governmental agencies, the courts or institutional clients. They may not be officially ‘published’ but they’re necessary for persuading policy makers to take action. Many such documents must be ‘published’ internally for readers that may be limited but nevertheless international and possibly influential. They have to be written to a high standard and presented well.

Advice on proposals, progress reports and more, from engineers for engineers

• Virginia Tech’s guidelines by Michael Alley provide a foundation for technical students, but they are as valid for reports written for bosses or clients. Concise, easy-to-understand advice on content organization and approaches to writing.
  
• The University of Toronto engineering department’s Online Handbook covers project proposals, progress reports, and ‘short reports’ to analyze a problem or compare solutions. Go to the sample texts to form an idea of this website’s information. Also provided are contrasted examples of effective and ineffective writing.

        
How to publish institutional or corporate documents. These guidelines set the standard for professional-quality publication of corporate or institutional memoranda such as are published by universities, governmental organs and many other bodies with internal but international communication needs.

4.Promoting Your Written Ideas: Speaking, Posters and Webpages to Spread Your Messages

Successful academics point out that writing well and publishing strategically is only part of the story of successful communication. You have to promote your ideas, formally and informally, in various media at the same time.

The assertion–evidence slide design for speakers is an innovative approach developed by engineers for engineers. Michael Alley at Virginia Tech explains how to create slides that make more impact and support better retention of information than the typical ‘bullet point’ format.

• Greater retention of information has been demonstrated after assertion–evidence presentations.
  
• Slide templates can help you apply this engineer-developed concept.

Poster examples and templates applying the assertion–evidence format from Michael Alley’s Virginia Tech website.

Write more effective bullet points. After reading about the assertion–evidence approach to better slides, if you still want to use slides with traditional titles plus bullet points, we have two tips:

1. Don’t use the MS Power Point default sizes for obvious words like ‘Introduction’ or ‘Results’. Make such obvious titles more discrete and use larger type for your real messages.
   
2. Look at examples of how to write effective bullet points that make explicit assertions. From the University of Toronto.

Posters: step-by-step advice from the University of Kansas Medical Center’s communication website.

Listen to expert speakers to improve your style.

• Top 100 speeches showing good use of changes in rhythm and voice volume as well as use of strategic pauses, compiled by the American Rhetoric Online Speech Bank. These speeches were given in political and social situations. Nevertheless, some short videos give excellent opportunities to observe good modern English speakers’ delivery of spoken messages. Control over rhythm, volume and silence is essential for conference speaking too. We recommend two short speeches: Robert F. Kennedy’s extemporaneous speech upon Martin Luther King’s assassination in 1968 and John F. Kennedy’s prepared speech at the Berlin wall in 1963.
  
• Richard Feynman, the top scientist-educator-speaker for decades according to many listeners, talks informally in this BBC video interview. The occasion is the publication of his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Notice how the physicist’s body language aids communication, never distracting from the message. Here you also see how pauses and varying the rhythm and volume of the voice focus attention on the messages.
  
• Engineers whose speaking you can identify with. Video clips of successful academic engineers talking briefly about the function of writing in their careers. After listening to the Kennedys and Feynman, you might feel they’re too remote to emulate. These interviews in an informal academic setting show many of the good speaking techniques the ‘top speakers’ use. From Colorado State University.

        
Writing for the WWW

• Smart advice on webpage writing and design. John Morkes and Jakob Nielson’s advice is evidence-based (eye-tracking research) and they are the leaders in this area. This site also shows heat maps that reveal how readers actually use web texts. Their website also illustrates a very simple no-graphics style that facilitates high levels of Internet traffic.
  
• Applets from Virginia Tech to enhance the practical usability of your engineering webpage.

5.Online English Language Aids

Multilingual specialized term databases

• The UPC technical term database covers Catalan, Castilian and French in addition to English.
  
• The European Union term database covers the languages of European states.

Mathematics in English: Polish mathematician Jerzy Trzeciak organizes this site as a glossary, but it’s more than that. Trzeciak exemplifies each word with sentences from technical publications, showing ways to combine words with formulas. You may already know what words like partition, converse or know mean—but this glossary can help you use them effectively in technical discussions.

Academic English punctuation: simple rules are outlined in an easy-to-consult way by the University of Wisconsin writing center They are a good place to start building a foundation.

Punctuation rules and manuscript conventions that are typical of English are outlined on the website for The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation by Jane Straus. Although the grammar advice mainly addresses the errors of native speakers of English; the punctuation notes are universally useful.

 Parallelism and verb tenses from the online writing Lab at Purdue University in the USA. This website has self-help grammar and punctuation lessons for non-English speaking writers. Some of them are relevant to writers of research papers and other professional documents. Our recommendations:

• Parallelism – You need to write lists (inside sentences or bulleted) in parallel form in English. Otherwise readers are confused.  (2)
  
• Verb tenses are mixed to tell coherent stories in English, just as in Catalan or Spanish. Review all the tenses at once, from a writer’s point of view.

Grammar through engineering examples from Virginia Tech. Here, grammar is taught in a way that’s worthy of a busy engineering researcher’s attention—it’s completely relevant to your writing. From Michael Alley.

Grammar, punctuation, and capitalization: A Handbook for Technical Writers and Editors by Mary K. McCaskil at Langley Research Center in the USA. This grammar ‘book’ uses traditional categories and some original ones. Authentic examples for engineers are used everywhere. To sample it, look at the section on the always-problematic concept of parallelism and itemization. Or the one on ambiguous comparisons. Unfortunately, at present (November 2007) only the 100-page PDF version is still available for downloading and the hyperlinked NASA version is offline.

Common grammar problems in the technical writing of non-native English speakers are discussed in the Mayfield Handbook of Technical and Scientific Writing.

Analyze word use in context with a simple online tool. Resolve your doubts efficiently with a ‘concordancer’ a simple tool that lets you see words aligned so you can observe their context in natural sentences. This type of display can help you with questions like ‘What preposition comes after attend?’ or ‘How can I use the verb submit when I send my manuscript to the journal?’

• See examples of how a ‘concordance’ can help you. University of Birmingham Tim Johns answers the question of what verb to use between superconductor and field in‘Can a superconductor expel a magnetic field?’ Or reflect on his analysis of the use of plural vs. singular verbs after the word data.
  
• Try concordancing at the Virtual Language Center of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University. It’s simple: type a word into the search box to resolve your doubts about using words in grammatical and semantically correct ways.

• The British National Corpus (BNC) is a larger sampling of the English language. Lexitutor provides a concordancer that gives you access to the BNC.
  
• Try a business letter concordancer. All academics have business correspondence. This very fast website uses a specific corpus of letters. The searches will be relevant when writing cover letters when you submit research papers, proposals or other professional documents. From Aoyama Gakuin University in Japan. To try it, type the word attend in the search box to see how this word is used in context. Then type in the word assist to contrast them.

        
The Elements of Style  

No list of English language resources would be complete without mentioning the very short book by Cornell University professor William Strunk, Jr. First published in 1918 and later edited by Strunk’s more famous student, writer E.B. White, today it’s affectionately called ‘Strunk and White’s Elements of Style’. Much advice about writing in modern English that is repeated in technical manuals derives from this little book. It is the source of widely held preferences for strong verbs and active voice, of certain modern syntax-based punctuation rules, and of the special English esthetic of ‘tightness’ (the opposite of ‘wordiness’), and much more.