More than a few years ago, bordering on the “many”, I was invited to take part in a graduate selection weekend for Ford in the UK. It was a battery of tests ranging from one-on-one interviews and team-working simulations to presentations and problem-solving “incidents” – all nicely wrapped up in dinners and coffees in a pleasant hotel in the countryside.

One of the tasks – maybe there were twelve of them, I didn’t count – was to decide what equipment should be offered as optional, standard or not at all for a sporty Ford Escort model (these were the pre-Focus days), to meet a budget. We then had to write a report explaining our choices, needing to meet a most important deadline (lunch).

Being a bit of a car enthusiast, I made what I thought was a decent selection (including ABS and airbags as standard equipment), whilst keeping some budget for a few luxuries as standard (a CD player, I think), to differentiate Ford from, say, BMW, whose cassette tape decks were one optional extra, speakers to hear music from seemingly another…

Being a well-drilled undergraduate engineer, I wrote the subsequent report in the only way I knew how - with an introduction, a summary, a body and conclusions.

When I was given the job offer a few weeks later (which I took - a decision point that remains with me to this day, and is definitely worthy of a post of its own), Ford gave me some feedback over the phone. My presentation had been borderline terrible, but the report I had written was excellent.

In fact, it turned out that I had been the only candidate to actually write a report. Everybody else had written prose.

So, in honour of that, and in recognition of the possible fact that report writing remains for me, over emails and presentations, the main recipient of work related keystrokes, here’s my report on report writing in engineering.

TITLE

An Investigation into the enduring and endearing constraints of report writing

Author

The Literal Engineer

SUMMARY

The act of reading a technical report involves a certain mental effort. This effort should be rewarded with increased knowledge. In order to minimise the effort and to maximise the potential for knowledge extraction, the report writer should generate the report in as standard a way as possible.

The act of writing a report invokes a particular and peculiar mode of language, which itself requires a mental switch and effort to maintain, the passive voice. Writing in the passive voice lends the report an appearance (but no guarantee) of objectivity. A potential pitfall of the passive voice is the risk of the writing becoming stilted and unreadable. Yet this pitfall is deemed to present a lower risk to knowledge transfer than chatty and poorly applied novelistic writing.

Deciding on the tense remains difficult. The report should be written with history and evidence in mind; a report is a snapshot of the status of whatever is being investigated at the time, in this case – report writing. Using the passive voice is, overall, a positive constraint.

EQUIPMENT

Mid 2012 MacBook Air

2006 Rain Recording PC workstation with Logitech keyboard and mouse

Microsoft Word 2013 and Online

Microsoft Office 365 / OneDrive

Typepad blogging platform

Evernote note taking platform

Firefox and Safari browsers

1. INTRODUCTION

A technical engineering report can be understood as a window to a complex and meaningful event (or series of events) that took place within an organisation. The intended goal of a report is that its findings be understood. For this goal of understanding to be even remotely achievable, the report writer must describe the event in sufficient detail with sufficient brevity and clarity to form a synthesis of the outcomes of that undertaking. A report should therefore be  logically structured and legible.

Ideally, the summary and conclusions from a report should add to the great body of human knowledge. It is recognised, however, that, more often than not, reports must be produced to describe small-scale and often painfully regular events.

Regardless of where a report lands on the scale of import (or lack thereof) to humanity, the form and language follow traditional structures. Report writing in the technical fields is designed to enforce (the impression of) objectivity. The passive voice depersonalises the investigation and can be construed as an attempt to prioritise facts over individual actions.

I did not post this report on 30^th Sep.2014

rather:

This report was posted on 30.09.2014.

The tradition of using the passive voice imposes a constraint on the writer, which forces upon him or her (the passive voice at the very least enables authors to avoid the awkward distinction of the sexes) a mental switch and effort to make and to sustain the passive voice. This is an appropriate cost of entry, as the reader needs only recognise one style, whatever the source of the report.

2. THE STRUCTURE OF A REPORT

Reports are constructed around a common set of elements that may vary in style, format or order from organisation to organisation, but nevertheless ensure swift navigation to the pertinent sections or level of detail for the experienced reader - from an overall summary (usually to be found near the beginning), to detailed descriptions of equipment and methods used, via a logically structured body of evidence and discussion. The report at hand loosely follows such a typical structure and does not purport to set any standards with its own form.

It is also based on very little evidence.

3. THE CONSTRAINTS IMPOSED ON LANGUAGE IN REPORT WRITING

Actions and analyses leading to conclusions and summaries – no matter how breathlessly exciting at the time of their experiencing – are, in translation into a report, passed through a mental filter that compresses them into the passive voice.

This imposes a constraint on the author, which, similarly to the imposition of a recognisable structure on a report, lightens the burden on the reader (see Section 3.1 for more considerations on the reader’s role).

As in so many cases, especially in the arts and in engineering, this constraint can be viewed as overall positive: few physicists or engineers have been recognised as possessing the gifts of novelistic writing (or even spelling); honing the craft of the passive voice relieves these authors of many grammatical pitfalls.

The key to the passive voice, and the difference to novelistic writing, is that there are no characters or personalities to deal with. Someone or something does not do something to some other thing or person. Rather, some action is done to some object.

The strut was loaded into a tensile testing machine and its stress-strain curve was determined.

The sample was subjected to 60 cycles of cyclic corrosion testing according to specification X

The tea bag was placed into the pre-warmed cup. The cup containing the tea bag was filled to just off brim-full with boiling water. The assembly was left to stew for 4 minutes.

Humans act in all technical investigations, but the passive voice strips them out as being extraneous information. Whilst this is not always to be considered positive in most human relationships, being able to divide out the common denominators is, just as in arithmetic and mathematics, key to understanding the basic signals of what is being investigated. Humans, then, are a form of noise – in technical reports, at least.

Writing in the passive voice is a skill that must be honed with practice. For as long as the passive voice does not come naturally to the author, each sentence needs to be reviewed to ensure that the reader is not forced to stumble upon a person or a character rather than a description.

The implication of objectivity is valid. It doesn’t matter who did the test (especially in the sense of Professor vs. technician, or he vs. she): it’s not a diary. That information can be captured in lab notes, engineers’ notebooks, or the famous case notes from AT&T Bell.

3.1 THE BENEFITS OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

The passive voice is intended to portray the investigation as being impartial. This:

• enforces a certain mental discipline
• requires a certain mental “Umstellung” that brings the author into a standardised frame of mind.
• Permits the reader to read reports from any source in a similar frame of mind.
• Avoids “War and Peace”-style questioning of who was doing what to what other thing – no need to buffer names
• Personalities and their status are largely avoided
  • The facts and conclusions come first

3.2 DISADVANTAGES OF THE PASSIVE VOICE

• It is easy to “hide” the contribution of laboratory personnel, lower level engineers, and so on, to attribute the report to one “star” player. This is more likely to be an issue in the world of university, where academics are forced to publish on a regular basis – a quality investigation on a returned part is less likely to be the cause of professional envy.
• Can be stilted, can become impenetrable,
• Enforces the use of some awkward words or constructions

4. SELECTING THE TENSE

A key decision that needs to be made early on in writing the report, one which generates some confusion, even within one report, is the tense. Some decision aids are suggested as follows:

• Tests are described in the past tense: they were performed (“the samples were tested using the tensile testing machine at yy mm / minute”)
• Results are described in the past tense: “the stress-strain curve Fig. x.y was generated”
• Findings may be either in the past or in the present tense:
  • If a test was performed on a particular sample, e.g. investigating a failure, then the findings may be presented in the past tense:
    • “brazing of the joint was found to be incomplete”
• If a result was fundamental, then the findings may be presented in the present tense:
  • “the maximum tensile strength of the xx joint is YY MPa”

5. CONCLUSIONS

The technical report remains its own art form. Its art is knowledge and its form shall minimise the resistance to knowledge transfer. I really think that the passive voice helps to – oh, damn!

BIBLIOGRAPHY

http://www.sussex.ac.uk/ei/internal/forstudents/engineeringdesign/studyguides/techreportwriting

an attribute which this post could not be accused of posessing

Cycling back home from the industrial estate where I work in an otherwise romantic Heidelberg, I cross a bridge that soars over a main road with its gemütlich evening rush hour jams, and, in the same leap, over an idyllische railway line to Mannheim. The bridge, though acting here only as the scenery for the introduction to this post, would be worthy of a blog post itself in the hands of one more knowledgable and appreciative of its design. It is certainly more complex than normal, with a second cycle path spiralling up between road and rail to meet mine.

The thing is, when I'm cycling back from work, this tributary deposits riders cycling up it directly onto my side of the road. This isn't of itself a problem - I can move over to leave them room. But when I do this, we both end up cycling on the wrong side of the road, also known in England as the correct side of the road.

Over the years I have imagined myself commenting to the other riders: "Oh, you're English too?" Only I've never dared. Not only because I'm quite so brazen, but because the grammar of saying it in German is so tricky to get pithily right that we'll have crossed before I've had a chance to parse it, especially if the person on the other bike is a lady.

Yes, it is with a weary sigh that I note that German, like Latin and some others I could probably research for you, is a language that feels the need for three genders. Echoing our stereotypes of German structuredness, the language can be viewed as a series of matrices, with lattices of cases and word endings that can either be viewed as ladders to a higher plane of language, or linguistic snakes that will land you in grammatical trouble wherever you misstep.

Mark Twain certainly had great fun pointing out the bizarre logic of this supposedly highly logical language in his essay "The Awful German Language"

What this baroque structure does offer is an unusual form of efficiency. Word endings become signifiers to what action is being done by whom to what, if at all. So, in the name of efficiency, I could refer to an English lady as an "Engländerin" - two distinct words implicated by the ending of just one.

The flip side of that efficiency, however, is a certain fragility: if, after drafting a phrase, I want to change the subject noun to a word of a different gender (or, in the more likely scenario, I find that the gender I had assumed was wrong), I have to wade back through the whole sentence, changing and correcting word endings scattered throughout it to something different. If I was fed up with Eine kleine Nachtmusik  I could go for a small nightcap instead - Ein kleiner Schlummertrunk, meaning I have changed all three words in that sentence (and that's without the accusative case of me actively wanting one...)

So German and its relatives are efficient when things go right, but each error results in a cascade of compound grammatical catastrophes. I find English to be more robust to errors: a glitch in one portion of a sentence doesn't have to mean a complete rewrite. "The" is "the" whatever grammatical chaos is going on around it.

So this post is really all about efficiency and where it should be applied.

There seem to me to be three distinct strategies available:

1. Being highly efficient in one way
2. Being efficient enough in multiple ways
3. Enabling functionality in as many ways as possible

Mechanical components are generally efficient in one way, but if they go wrong, they are broken and need to be replaced. Highly-strung systems will also break with the loss of a first component, and may even result in losing a chain of components, as in a German sentence.

Systems can add robustness through redundancy. This is generally at the cost of efficiency, but usually can be said to be efficient enough.

Enabling functionality in multiple ways is reflective of the organic, of the free-form, of the gnarly - yes, of language, too. It's not often possible to attain this in mechanical engineering - I'm struggling to think of an example here, but perhaps sacrificial anti-corrosion coatings is one, where a scratch leads to corrosion of one material that results in the protection of another.

But when we're designing our product, irrespective of its apparent simplicity, we can always consider the efficiencies going on around it. We need to design for safety, for cost-efficiency, for energy efficiency - for a product's whole lifecycle. And if we can step away from the fragile and towards the organic in considering the world our product inhabits, we can perhaps go a long way towards attaining the maximal efficiency over the long term. Nature managed it, anyway!   Escaping from the semi-philosophical and going back to my bike problem; because of this ability in German to feminise words, either I could ask "sind Sie auch Engländerin?", which would be efficient, but would, through that word auch meaning also imply that I was also female, or I could ask "sind Sie such Engländer?" implying that she was male.   Mixing things up to avoid the problem ("kommen Sie such aus England?" - do you also come from England?) would be an option, but none of the alternatives is as concise as the original thought.

So I have never dared ask... And I expect that's fine by the good ladies of Heidelberg.

The relationship between engineers and numbers is often an uneasy one. Engineers are by and large mathematically literate after all those years at university, but we don’t necessarily feel at home in the world of maths. It’s a subject that we feel is to be dropped at the earliest opportunity.

Once we enter employment, we don’t need maths anyway. We learn the formulae and relationships that are pertinent to the subject matter at hand - and forget the rest. If we do happen to need something from “the rest”, we generally know where to unearth it and, after some thought, can apply it.

My own mathematical world is rather limited. I need to interpret test data, certainly, but have found that it’s the qualitative information that I extract that is useful rather than any best-fit curves or dynamic equations of state. I do sometimes need to calculate friction coefficients, but since the formulae are simple enough to encapsulate in a spreadsheet, I don’t actually need to know what precisely those formulae are (but I can find them if required).

If mathematics is one aspect of this relationship between engineers and numbers, numeracy is the other. Whatever results we get out of testing, or whatever design information we wish to convey, I need to talk numbers with colleagues, suppliers or customers. Given that I’ve living and working in Germany, these discussions often take place in German. Now, whilst I’m pretty good at the language from a linguistic standpoint, I have a real problem with German numbers.

I’d like to point out at this juncture that I was never bad at simple additions and subtractions in English. But the quirks of the way the German language treats numbers make me stumble when naming or hearing numbers in isolation and often I’ll simply give up if I need to engage in a little mental arithmetic.

The problem is that German numbers are - partially - enunciated backwards.

If I want to say the number 65 in English, I have a nice mental image: sixty-five - 65. However, German tells us the smaller number first: fünf-und-sechszig. This means that my innate numerical image is messed up and I need to hold figures in a buffer before I can complete my own natural image: (5)´6 -> 65. 

My internal workings are a very fast version of this:

“OK, he’s just said the number five, and there’s an “and” being said, so there will be a number coming before it… So, what is it, then?… Wait for it… Ah, OK, so it was a sixty. What was the first number again? A five. So, that sixty was the tens digit and five was the unit digit, so he meant to say sixty five.”

That usually works, as I say, when numbers are mentioned in isolation. But having to perform arithmetic with them seems to be a mental effort too far.

“So, he wants me to take five and sixty, then subtract eight and twenty. So that means… scramble…scramble….seven and thirty.” My German colleagues, who have grown up with this nonsense, can cope with this much better than I have been able to and are therefore usually much faster at computing the ansewr and beat me to it, meaning that, after a short while, I gave up even trying.

The mental effort is compounded by larger numbers where the hundreds are spoken first, then come the units, followed by the tens. So these end up as:

“Six hundred two and fifty.”

My internal numerical imaging is so strong that as well as my problems in parsing and understanding the numbers I hear,  I have problems in saying them, too. This has caused at least one near miss in my time as an engineer in Germany, where I told a prototype builder to make something one hundred and fifty eight millimetres long, rather than one hundred five and eighty millimetres. Thank goodness for sketches and prints, is all I can say to that.

I know German primary school teachers who have confirmed that the German numbering system really does create difficulties for children at school - but given that quite a lot of German engineering seems to work reasonably well, it does not seem to be a handicap for life.

Other languages have their idiosyncrasies, notably (in my experience, anyway), French with its sixty-fourteen (for 74) and four-score-and-three (for 83): but since these quirks are still sequential, I can cope (but still hope that the Belgian "septante, octante" and "nonante" take over the francophone world. Maltese numbers are so complicated that they have been almost completely done away with; but there is even a slight hiccup in logic in English: "thirteen", "fourteen" and so on are a version of the German, with their units being named first. But it's such a short sequence of exceptions to the rule that I would treat them along with "eleven" and "twelve" as practically being units in their own right.

If you’re a German reading this, I’d be fascinated to know what your mental processes are for this, and whether you feel that you’re at some kind of mental processing disadvantage because of it; or even if you feel that it’s a kind of mental brain training that gives you that additional edge.

If you’re an Asian right-to-left reader reading this, I wonder if your mental image of numbers is different to mine, or whether the western numeral notation system has become so dominant that you think sixty five as a six followed by a five.

Now of course, it can sometimes simply not matter which way the numbers crop up…

554 + 445 = 999

545 + 454 = 999

… But by the time I’ve worked that out, it’s too late: I’m frazzled and am looking for the nearest pen - or a cup of coffee.