Cultivating Plain Language Skills for Engineering Students

Catherine Woodworth Wong; Cynthia Helen Carlson

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Conference: 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition
Location: Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Publication Date: June 22, 2025
Start Date: June 22, 2025
End Date: August 15, 2025
Conference Session: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES) Technical Session 8: Communication and Liberal Education
Tagged Division: Liberal Education/Engineering & Society Division (LEES)
Page Count: 10
Permanent URL: https://peer.asee.org/56185

Paper Authors

biography

Catherine Woodworth Wong University of New Hampshire orcid.org/0000-0002-8254-4137

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Catherine Wong, M.S., M.S. is an Assistant Professor and Librarian for Engineering and Physical Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. She is passionate about connecting people with nature through participatory science and people to books and technology through the CLICK For Quality Education Foundation.

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biography

Cynthia Helen Carlson PE, PhD Merrimack College orcid.org/0000-0002-6985-6881

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Before earning her doctorate, Dr. Carlson spent 10 years as a water resources engineer, working on water management projects across the U.S., the Middle East, and Singapore. She has been teaching for over a decade and is now an associate professor and chair of civil engineering at Merrimack College. Dr. Carlson is passionate about water resources, reduction of environmental impact, spatial analysis, and student engagement.

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Abstract

While engineers are learning the vocabulary of the profession, understandably, they want to practice, and perhaps show their professors that they are proficient. This leads to student writing that is overly complicated and full of jargon. This is not the type of document that would be clear to the public, or even to a professional outside of the narrowly focused field of the particular engineer. After graduation, engineers’ writing becomes exponentially more important. Often approval of projects relies on residents’ or clients’ understanding of engineers’ work. For example, an engineering firm completing an investigation of an important health concern such as looking into a cluster of cancer cases, air pollution, or water pollution in a neighborhood, but the community fails to mobilize because the engineers were not clear in their presentation of the data and health risks. The plain language movement arose from the legal field and the need to provide more understandable documents free of legal jargon and has since been adopted by many other fields, especially in public health and other healthcare professions, where understanding information about a treatment plan or how to take medications can have serious or even fatal consequences. As engineers are also often involved with public health and environmental health initiatives, encouraging engineering students and professionals to think about how best to explain projects and concepts in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way, as well as how to ask for feedback, local knowledge, and other collaborative communications is an important skill.

At this college, the science and engineering librarian had been trained in plain language through a Plain Language for Health workshop offered by the Center for Health Literacy Research and Practice at Tufts University School of Medicine. She used these skills to create a plain language workshop appropriate for engineering students. The junior civil engineering students had met with the librarian early in the semester to discuss library resources and research paper topics, and so had a rapport with her. Later in the semester, the librarian came again to the class to present the importance of cultivating a sense of cultural humility and using plain language, and to run through several examples of how plain language techniques could be applied to civil engineering. Students were then encouraged to use the plain language techniques in subsequent assignments.

This paper and presentation will discuss the importance of introducing new engineers to plain language resources and methodology, as well as some resources that instructors can use in their classrooms. An example of a classroom exercise will be conducted.

Citation
Format

Wong, C. W., & Carlson, C. H. (2025, June), Cultivating Plain Language Skills for Engineering Students Paper presented at 2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition , Montreal, Quebec, Canada . https://peer.asee.org/56185

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - While engineers are learning the vocabulary of the profession, understandably, they want to practice, and perhaps show their professors that they are proficient. This leads to student writing that is overly complicated and full of jargon. This is not the type of document that would be clear to the public, or even to a professional outside of the narrowly focused field of the particular engineer. After graduation, engineers’ writing becomes exponentially more important. Often approval of projects relies on residents’ or clients’ understanding of engineers’ work. For example, an engineering firm completing an investigation of an important health concern such as looking into a cluster of cancer cases, air pollution, or water pollution in a neighborhood, but the community fails to mobilize because the engineers were not clear in their presentation of the data and health risks. The plain language movement arose from the legal field and the need to provide more understandable documents free of legal jargon and has since been adopted by many other fields, especially in public health and other healthcare professions, where understanding information about a treatment plan or how to take medications can have serious or even fatal consequences. As engineers are also often involved with public health and environmental health initiatives, encouraging engineering students and professionals to think about how best to explain projects and concepts in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way, as well as how to ask for feedback, local knowledge, and other collaborative communications is an important skill.

At this college, the science and engineering librarian had been trained in plain language through a Plain Language for Health workshop offered by the Center for Health Literacy Research and Practice at Tufts University School of Medicine. She used these skills to create a plain language workshop appropriate for engineering students. The junior civil engineering students had met with the librarian early in the semester to discuss library resources and research paper topics, and so had a rapport with her. Later in the semester, the librarian came again to the class to present the importance of cultivating a sense of cultural humility and using plain language, and to run through several examples of how plain language techniques could be applied to civil engineering. Students were then encouraged to use the plain language techniques in subsequent assignments.

This paper and presentation will discuss the importance of introducing new engineers to plain language resources and methodology, as well as some resources that instructors can use in their classrooms. An example of a classroom exercise will be conducted.

AU  - Catherine Woodworth Wong
AU  - Cynthia Helen Carlson PE, PhD
CY  - Montreal, Quebec, Canada 
DA  - 2025/06/22
PB  - ASEE Conferences
TI  - Cultivating Plain Language Skills for Engineering Students
UR  - https://peer.asee.org/56185
ER  -