Winsor

The article “Joining the Engineering Community: How Do Novices Learn to Write Like Engineers?” written by Dorothy Winsor, who is retired from Iowa State University, conducted a study and research on how new employees learn the practices of writing within their job. The first study Winsor conducted was of college students who alternated working a full-time job along with college classes, making them the ideal group of young people to collect data from.  They answered questions about where they learned to do the writing they do at work. The results show that the best learning came from interactions and feedback from co-workers and supervisors. Most of the time students use a combination of using models, advice from co-workers, and editing from supervisors. The models they used is more for format and style of the report in which they are making and some use it to know what exactly they are expected to be writing in the report. For others, co-workers did the same for the people who used the models.  Co-workers gave the students ideas and what to emphasize with their reports. It was really important for several students that their supervisors reviewed their reports because they helped them with tone and other things so that it would be politically correct.  They also gave them advice on things that would go for every report, not just a specific one.  Winsor came to a conclusion that this kind of writing cannot be learned from just a textbook.  While the textbook shows the reins of the reporting, the workplace is the only place to learn and become good at writing the reports. Winsor worries what the students mean when they say they use models.  In a study done by Warren Werner, it showed that many students use the model to copy, and in the process of copying they use the detail needed for the report, meaning they learned nothing from it. This is an important article because it shows that going to college only does so much. To really become good at your profession, you need job experience to take it to the next level.  It is important for students and employers to realize that the novices will not be perfect right away and it takes experience to learn the ropes.

Word Count: 379