If someone told me prior to starting this program that the engineering "field" was really about writing, I would not have believed that person. I had come to understand engineering as scientifically based and the information produced from it as factual. Yet, as Dorothy Winsor's "Engineering Writing/Writing Engineering" delineates, engineers actually "... inscribe a written representation of physical reality and then use more writing to build agreed-upon knowledge and their own characters..." (68).
Winsor suggests that this "knowledge" that engineers impart in their writing is neither created by a machine nor just exists on its own, but is formed through communication with other similar texts. Interestingly, these reports, which supposedly are factual by nature, are only accepted as "facts" if other engineers are convinced of the validity of the information contained in them (60). This ritual of approving or rejecting a document enforces the values within the engineering field/culture; the approved reports are both symbolic manifestations of these values and integral elements in the construction of knowledge.
Slowly backing off of my soap box, I would like to end this response on another note. According to the Microsoft Word 2007 application, a synonym for the word engineer is "persuade". How fitting that this definition coincides with one of Winsor's main points! The English major in me started to wonder about other words that could be associated with what an engineer might do: make, structure, build, craft, shape, and form - all words that involve manipulation of some sort.
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I think I would be inclined to believe Windsor if the engineers to which she refers just "made stuff up" when they wrote. If their writing had no connection to reality, then, yes, I would agree that writing constructs reality and constructs knowledge. But when engineers make an argument about a new type of engine for a plane, they are either right or murderers. A socially constructed reality does not keep a plane in the air, a ship afloat, or our homes heated in the winter. If an engineers writing had no connection to reality, then we would "have" unlimited fuel, frictionless surfaces, and rockets that travel infinitely faster than the speed of light.
Alas, Francis Bacon said it best, "Nature to be commanded must be obeyed." Bacon was not a radical environmentalist. He just knew that in order to have any productive scientific inquiry, the laws of nature had to be discovered and properly followed.
I tend to agree.
Just my $0.50. Your posts make me think stuff, April. I 'preciate it.
DTR
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