Engineering Words: Communicating Clearly in the Workplace

Contents

• Welcome: introduces the book and what you will learn from reading it.
• Clear Communication Guidelines: provides an overview of the basics of clear writing, and explains why engineers need to be able to communicate clearly.
• The Business Context of Communication: an introduction to writing in a business context: who you are writing for (peers, managers, customers, and more) and what contexts you are writing in (financial, engineering, marketing, and more). In addition, the book provides an overview of the flow of money in a business and explains how understanding that flow can help you create business cases for your projects.
• Résumés to Cover Letters: describes how to write résumés and cover letters that will help you get the job you want.
• Flow of a Project in a Company: covers the steps in a project from the beginning through development to deployment and ongoing support and describes the documentation needed at each step along the way.
• Designing Effective Presentations: being a successful communicator also requires verbal communication skills. This chapter covers the steps needed to prepare a successful presentation.
• Handling Yourself and the Room in Presentations: covers what you need to do in the days immediately preceding your presentation, how to prepare on the day of the presentation, how to deliver your presentation, how to handle your audience, how to deal with questions, and how to follow up.
• Human Cognition: to effectively communicate with humans, you need to understand how humans learn and how you can apply that knowledge as you try to teach or persuade an audience. This chapter provides an overview of the aspects of human cognition that apply to communicating.
• Constructing Explanations: explores two important techniques you can use to explain complex topics. First, how to use visual techniques, such as white space, figure and ground, and grouping to increase the impact of your writing, and second, how to use techniques from the user interface world to better present information to your audience.
• Personas and Scenarios: describes how to use personas and scenarios as part of the product specification process.
• Writing Functional Specifications: how to write useful specifications that clearly define the features and functions of a product or service.
• Testing Your Products: describes the different approaches that companies take to test products and describes both the testing process and how to properly document test cases and test suites.
• References and Index: an extensive list of references for further exploration and a comprehensive index.