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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

Any engineer that went to college should have taken multiple technical writing classes. Engineering school vigorously demands that you learn how to write properly and accurately, something that seems lost on "web engineers"

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The problem with school, or college, is that they tell you, you need to write. They don’t explain to you why you need to write, and what are the benefits of writing.

That’s why most design reviews are very painful to read, and understand. That’s why company wiki becomes a pile of useless information.

> They don’t explain to you why you need to write, and what are the benefits of writing.

Then thats a bad school or program. It was drilled into us nonstop that lives depend on writing good reports. You do not want to be the person blamed because your report was vague or misleading. Bad writing kills people.

> They don’t explain to you why you need to write

That is a failure of the professor. I was blessed to have a professor with an engineering degree, a writing degree, and industry experience as a technical writer. He was uniquely qualified to teach engineers how to write and why good writing was important.

It really doesn't. I got an engineering degree without taking a single technical writing course. Not counting short physics lab write-ups, I think I wrote a single technical paper during undergrad.

You didn't do a capstone project? My capstone was half engineering, half technical report writing. The engineering section was considered worthless unless you wrote a acceptable report. Nobody cares about what you built unless you can write a proper report about it.

How is that possible?

Yeah, that project was the one paper, but there was essentially no focus on technical writing in the course. And even if it were half on technical writing, half of a single semester is hardly a major focus for a degree program. It's rather underemphasized.

This is part of the reason why "engineer" is a protected title in many places.

I've never heard of CS undergrad programs requiring a technical writing (TW) course, let alone many. Can we do a quick poll? Leave a comment with the name of the university where you got your CS undergrad degree, the year (or decade) you graduated, and whether or not TW courses were required.

EECS at Cal for example doesn't seem to require any TW classes: https://eecs.berkeley.edu/academics/undergraduate/cs-ba

University of Michigan, 2012, a technical writing course was required (TCHNCLCM 300) and it's still required: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Vh83l2mW6j9P91eqV4W3UbqU...

Loyola University Maryland, 2012, I don’t know if a technical writing course even existed.

Edit: But I do want to note that I love and appreciate good technical writing, and have gotten a lot of experience doing it in the workplace. It’s a really important skill, but with undergrad curriculum so jam-packed already, I can see why it might not be a required full-semester course.

sewing thread emoji

(Yes, but it was combined with an operating system class.)

Anyone who went to college should have taken multiple classes that require you to write. Myopic "engineering schools" miss the point of higher learning.

I picked Engineering as it didn't have any writing requirements. Now I wish I'd spent more time writing. It's a skill that I need and want to develop now that I understand how the world works better than I did as a university student.

I've never taken a technical writing class but I did work on school newspapers and also took English classes that involved writing.

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