ABE technical writing, Summaries of Agricultural engineering

Download ABE technical writing and more Summaries Agricultural engineering in PDF only on Docsity! Aspects of Technical Writing for Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering Graduates Subhashree N. Srinivasagan *, Sunoj Shajahan* Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, North Dakota State University, 1221 Albrecht Boulevard, Fargo, ND 58102, USA Abstract Writing a good article is both an art and science. For most of the beginners of article writing, the structure and organi- zation may not be clear and confusing. The skill of writing can be acquired with patience, learning, and practice. The major goal of this course is to develop effective technical skills and to help the students to become accomplished writers. To make the students understand the difficulties, ways to overcome them, and expectations in article writing, an interview was arranged among the students and their advisor. Key questions were framed by the students and the responses were obtained from the advisor. An elaborate discussion was held on specific issues to capture the details. Various aspects of technical writing, such as initial struggle as a beginner and the ways to overcome, managing time, organizing ideas, and overall solution strategies were discussed during the interview and presented and summarized in this assessment. 1. Introduction This general informative article was based on the disciplinary report submitted to the course ENGL 751, Spring 2016. The background of the report is to help the students better un- derstand the writing expectation and norms in the field of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering, for which an inter- view was conducted with Dr. Igathinathane Cannayen, As- sistant Professor, Department of Agricultural and Biosystems Engineering (ABEN), NDSU. The interview was conducted to obtain information on the following aspects: © Practice developing useful interview questions, as well as conducting interviews Understand writing and rhetorical conventions and ex- pectations in the field of ABEN © Develop an understanding of the discipline from a writ- ing standpoint ¢ Practice reporting key information. In the interview the following questions were asked: 1. What are the struggles that you encountered as a writer during your initial days? 2. How did you overcome all these struggles mentioned above? 3. How do you organize your thoughts and ideas while you start writing? 4. How to avoid framing complex and indirect sen- tences/how to explain complex ideas? 5. How to do measure the completeness of a section in an article/article as a whole? * Graduate and doctoral students, respectively, under Dr. Igathinathane Cannayen, Associate Professor, BEN, NDSU as their major advisor. 6. What are the fields from which students of ABEN can learn from the articles published? 7. How to manage time while writing an article? 8. What are the articles that you consider as the best in terms of technical content and writing? 9. What do you think are the common mistakes that stu- dents make while writing an article? 10. How to keep the readers interested? Responses obtained and the experience of the authors and other graduate students were synthesized and presented in this article. 2. Aspects of Technical Writing in ABEN 2.1. Struggles of a writer in 90’s During earlier days, no formal training was given to the students who aspired to write an article. There were also very few resources for obtaining the published articles. Fur- ther, there was no clear understanding of the structure of a research article, for students starting on their own. Self- understanding of the published article was not of much help. Hence, the student had to struggle his/her way to publish an article. Earlier, writers did not give much emphasis on the graph- ical component of the publication and they relied mostly on professional drafting services. But nowadays various soft- ware like R Studio (R Core Team, 2015), SAS (Institute, 1985), MatLab (Guide, 1998) were available to produce high-quality graphical outputs while doing the data analysis. Now the authors are expected to produce their own graphical material. However, the situation is not the same now, training on technical writing is offered to students, and they are also pro- vided access to many published articles online or print forms. Students are now made aware of many graphical and statis- tical software required for publishing a good quality article. Students should consider the graphical elements as impor- tant, as these offer the readers a quick overview of the re- sults. 2.2. Ways to overcome the initial struggles of a writer A good writing skill will develop only with years of experi- ence. It may be compared to “learning to ride” a bicycle, which obviously requires a lot of patience. Similarly, learn- ing to write an article requires a lot of patience and perse- verance. Students should realize that the article is “theirs” and they should play the lead role, while the advisor pro- vides guidance and review. Students committing themselves to this lead role and “own” the article tend to learn more on the writing aspect than others rely heavily on other supports. Writing is a perfect example of “learning by doing.” Students should be ready to learn from the mistakes and experiences. Once the student is ready with the article draft, they should realize that it will undergo several rounds of revisions. The review comments and mistakes from each revision have to be “documented” for by the students for their future reference. This helps the student from not committing the same mis- takes again. Also in a proactive way, the student can learn from published articles and understand the basic rules and way of presentation. Students should get themselves familiarized with the “ex- pectations” of the scientific articles in their field of special- ization. Reading more technical articles and writing more will help the students to improve their writing skills. For ex- ample, if there is an equation to be inserted into an article the student must look into other published articles to under- stand the basic rule followed to write an equation. A similar approach can be adopted for figures, tables, references, and other elements of a technical writing. Good approaches fol- lowed in articles of journals of repute can be adopted by the students as well, while understanding clearly what plagia- rism is and how to avoid it. 2.3. Organizing thoughts and ideas Writing of an article should start with a good outline, where students will demonstrate and capture the essence of the ar- ticle. Such outlines should be discussed initially with the ad- visor for directions and approval of the concept. With the outline serving as the skeleton, the students will have a head start in developing the article. Organization of ideas and thoughts starts with deciding on the research need/problem which the student (article) set out to address. The standard framework for scientific paper include sec- tions, such as introduction, methods, results, discussion (sometimes these are combined as results and discussion), suggestions for future research, conclusion, acknowledg- ments, and references. One of the simple ways is: once the outline is complete, the students should fill each sec- tion with a sketchy points (e.g., bulleted points) that comes to their mind. These points should be further developed into cohesive text paragraphs. Tables and figures (e.g., pic- tures, graphs, flow charts, diagrams) supporting these points should be included in the article. Sometimes these graphical elements, generated from the analyzed results were inserted first along outlined points. Each section should convey the information clearly and follow the standard exceptions. For example, in the intro- duction, the importance of the problem/need should be dis- cussed. The student should synthesize and acknowledge the past reported efforts for solving the same or similar prob- lems. This will allow the readers to realize what was avail- able knowledge and appreciate the “research gap” addressed by the articles. The student should also discuss the novelty of the present study’s approach to solving the problem and the overall sig- nificance of the work. Usually, the introduction section ends with a list of clear objectives of the study, which actually serve as a guide the other sections of the paper, namely methods, results, and discussion. Each section should be divided in into subsections and paragraphs, as appropriate, in such a way that each division deals with only one overall idea. Paragraphs help to divide different aspects of the overall idea and they also signal a “jump” or “transition” of ideas. Every sentence in the para- graph has to be paid attention to see if it is properly con- nected. There should be a proper connection between sen- tences and the paragraphs might start with thesis sentence. A linear style of writing, that does not make the reader re- fer back to the material presented earlier. This linear style of writing will be easy on the readers and, if possible, should be followed throughout or most parts of the paper. Overall, the organization should follow the “story-telling” (what happens next — all sections tied together — sections playing a definite role in the story) concept to hold the readers’ attention. 2.4. Writing style and approach If the student feels that a sentence is complex, breaking the sentence into two or three sentences must be done for better understanding, as the aim of the article is to make it sim- ple and understandable for the reader. In technical writing, the motto should be “Not write to impress, but inform.” This idea again ties with the “expectations” of technical reader- ship. Sometimes breaking into smaller sentences may not sound better, but it should be followed if it helps the reader to understand better. The current trend is to use more di- rect sentences (active voice), wherever possible then indirect (passive voice). However, a balanced mixture is acceptable. Earlier, the articles were “author-centric” where the writer used convoluted ideas and complex sentences in the article with no effort to simplify them for the readers. The readers had to struggle to understand the ideas and concepts; am- plified by the technical nature of the material, but the trend has changed. Now, the author has to write “reader-centric”