I have two topics to introduce, two techniques to teach: Ideographic Editing and the Five-part Functional Description. Impatient? Go to Chapter Twelve for Ideographic Editing or Chapter Sixteen for the Five-part Functional Description. But to understand, to appreciate, to apply these two techniques, stay with me while I educate you, amuse you, even captivate you on the way.

This is a How To text on Engineering Writing. I could have said Technical Writing, because it grew from the teaching notes I prepared for the Technical Writing course I once taught. It’s an engineering truism that all you need is Newton’s Law, F = ma; the rest is commentary. One can deduce almost everything from F = ma. One exception is the Navier-Stokes Equation; it was in-ductively developed from observations and can’t be deduced from Newton’s Law.

To learn the techniques required to efficiently solve everyday engineering problems, however, one must sit through the classes where the commentary is discussed. But contemplate for a mo-ment what those classes would have been had F = ma never been introduced. I claim the typical Technical Writing course is full of useful information and fine writing advice—the commentary, but it never gives you a Newton’s Law, the equivalent of F = ma. I mean to do that here.

The aspiring writer in Shakespeare’s time would have memorized the Classics: Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Plutarch’s Lives, even Plautus. Later, Abraham Lincoln was di-rected to Shakespeare, and to that masterpiece of committee-writing, the Authorized [King James] Bible. But neither Shakespeare nor Lincoln had to write a spec that explained to a poten-tial contractor exactly what a client required, when, and where, such that all parties, including you, avoided court appearances, and all before this coming Friday afternoon.

Even the genius Galileo couldn’t formulate Newton’s Law from all those swinging lanterns and dropped cannon-balls, so how are mere mortals like you and I to extract the kernel of effective engineering writing from Shakespeare, Tolstoy, or Hemingway? We can’t. We find ourselves in the same boat as the rookie who asked Ted Williams how he hit a knuckle-ball. “Between the seams,” Williams said. Good writers—like good athletes—can seldom transfer their skill to nov-ices. Often the athlete who struggles, who must consciously develop the techniques the superstar was born with, becomes the better coach. I offer myself as just such a journeyman, and I base my instructions on two threads of Cognitive Science, one Linguistic, originating with Noam Chom-sky, and one Mathematical, originating with Kurt Gödel.

Concerning the Linguistic thread: I search each new English Usage book in vain for evidence of a deductive approach. They all take the Navier-Stokes approach: “We have found the following structures to be awkward or unclear, so don’t use them. We have found such-and-such a word to be irreplaceable as the sign for Concept X, so please don’t use it to mean Concept Y.” “OK”, you say, “I won’t use those structures, nor use that word for Concept Y.” That’s induction: don’t do this; don’t do that. Some even manage, “Do this; do that”. Pointillistic strictures; no basis for de-ducing good writing principles.

Language is an innate human ability; I start there. You no doubt have heard of Noam Chomsky, even if never having read his work. Until his 1957 book, Syntactic Structures, Linguistics was stuck at induc¬tion, had not yet marshaled enough facts from which to deduce. If he is remem-bered for but one thing in his long career, it will be his demonstration that language is not learned, but is innate. But most people don’t—can’t—believe that language is innate; you proba-bly don’t believe it, either. Most will claim, as a counter-example, “You still have to teach kids not to say ‘buyed’”, forgetting that there must be a reason why the kid said ‘buyed’ to begin with.

I’ll not bother arguing the point; as Yoda might say, “believe, or not believe; write better do”. So I give you the evidence for that innate capability. After two introductory chapters, which summa-rize the content of conventional Expository Writing Manuals, we begin investigating the struc-tures of the human brain that facilitate language, and one of the ramifications thereof: those re-markably-similar lan¬guages, called Creoles, construc¬ted by the children of polyglot laborers in several geographically and temporally separated locations. We move on to the possible origin and the known ancestry of English, the language in which this is written. This will give us some insight into its structure and use, from which we can make informed deductions.

We then begin an investigation of English Grammar as if it were a computer language, not a Lib-eral Art, arriving at Phrase Structure Diagramming (PSD), a method that illuminates the relation between structure and meaning. Using PSD, we deduce many important rules of English Usage heretofore opaque, such as punctuation, appositive phrases, and parallel construction. We arrive at Ideographic Editing, a nearly turn-the-crank method for making random walks in word space into elegant and effective sentences.

We turn then to my second theme, Presentation, with a discussion of Research Papers and For-mal Reports. I then treat you to a short view of Graphic Aids, based on the work of Professor Edward Tufte.

The mathematical thread, more important to engin¬eering practice than the Linguistic one, begins with Kurt Gödel’s insight into Open and Closed Systems: we want to construct—through careful description—Closed Systems, and I present a method for doing so: the Five-part Functional De-scription. The book ends with practical applications of these insights into innate cognition and closure. Along the way, we discuss the contributions of polymath Cognitive Scientist Steven Pinker, cartoonist Larry Gonick, Graphic Guru Edward Tufte, and Computer Scientist Edward Yourdon.

You are reading this to become a more effective writer—perhaps in desperation; perhaps from ambition—and to become a better engineer, because that’s why we became engineers in the first place: to create.

So on with the show.