Engineering Words: Communicating Clearly in the Workplace

by Sharon Burton, Bonni Graham Gonzalez

Overview

Over the course of a career, every engineer needs to communicate, in both written and oral form, with other engineers and non-engineers. Yet, too many engineers never develop this basic skill.

Engineering Words draws on the authors’ extensive experience as technical communicators and their popular class in technical communication for engineers at the University of California, Riverside, to present a comprehensive introduction to communicating in the business world.

This second edition expands to cover writing tools (including AI tools), functioning in today’s workplace, ethics, and selling your ideas.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781937434908
Publisher:	XML Press
Publication date:	10/01/2025
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	2 MB

About the Author

Sharon Burton consults as a technical content strategist and teaches part-time at the University of California, Riverside, in the Bourns College of Engineering. Leveraging her graduate cultural anthropology education, her career has been built around making content and content development easier for both businesses and content consumers. During that time, she has also taught upwards of 8,000 people in corporate and university-level courses.
Bonni Graham Gonzalez teaches part-time at the University of California, Riverside, in the Bourns College of Engineering. Bonni's career has focused around storytelling, including designing and writing manuals that actually explain how to use products and creating award-winning marketing materials that both educate and sell.

Table of Contents

• Communication Guidelines: offers clear guidelines on the basics of writing for a business audience, and how to use modern tools, such as AI, to be more effective and efficient.
• Business Context: presents an overview of business finance and how to write for business peers and decision makers.
• The Workplace Ecosystem: shows you how to be effective in any environment, large or small, remote or on-premises.
• Résumés and Cover Letters: shows you how to create cover letters and résumés that work.
• Flow of a Project: describes the phases of a project and the documentation required in each phase.
• Effective Presentations: shows you how to create effective presentation slides and deliver a powerful presentation.
• Human Cognition: describes how to use our understanding of how people think to communicate more effectively.
• Constructing Explanations: describes how to explain complex information using visual design and user-focused structure.
• Personas and Scenarios: describes how to create and use personas and scenarios effectively.
• Writing Specifications: describes the different types of specifications (technical, functional, test, etc.) and, through examples, shows how to write each type.