Bibliography
Banuazizi, Atissa. Creating Your BE.109 Presentation.
Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, 15 Mar. 2006. PDF.
What do you want your
reader to remember about your talk? Remind your reader of primary findings. Explain
what these findings contribute to the field. Those three topics in the
sentences before, along with the basics of good presentations, and the concepts
behind the effective approach of presenting information are in this source. These
are all concepts that this presentation goes over and focuses on to help other
engineers produce effective presentations.
Cheng, Wai K. A Guide to Writing 2.672 Analytical
Reports. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, Fall 2007. PDF.
This document is
intended to highlight what should be contained in lab reports for a specific
course, but it can also be used to show the general setup of any good lab
report. This document assumes you are familiar with writing lab reports from
previous classes. It builds on that knowledge while pointing to some key
differences. In particular, the focus of lab reports is on the theoretical
model you develop, not on the experiments you do to test it. This is intended
for college students who are writing lab reports for classes.
Gopsill,
James A., Hamish C. McAlpine, and Ben J. Hicks. "A Social Media Framework
to Support Engineering Design Communication." ScienceDirect. Advanced
Engineering Informatics, Oct. 2013. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. <http://ejournals.ebsco.com.proxy.lib.iastate.edu/Direct.asp?AccessToken=95J5XIX8XIRIDK5551ZI1EUUQP5P8DM4Q&Show=Object>.
Engineering Design
Communication (EDC) is fundamental to almost all Engineering Design activities
as it provides the ability for knowledge and information to be shared between
engineers. This communication contains a great deal of rationale relating to
the evolution of Product Development and is essential for understanding the
product and the reason for its design. The need to support EDC is becoming more
important due to the fact that Product Development is becoming more
distributed, multi-disciplinary and involving greater re-use of past designs.
With the advent of social media, it is argued that there is the technical
capability to provide more effective support for EDC within a computer-mediated
environment. In order to explore this potential, this paper defines the
requirements for the effective support of EDC through an extensive review of
the literature. It then discusses the suitability of a social media approach
and then presents the theoretical foundations of a social media framework to
support EDC.
Hunter, Ian W., and Barbara Hughey. Instructions for
Using Your Laboratory Notebook. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering
Office, 5 June 2007. PDF.
“Keeping a complete and
accurate record of experimental methods and data is a vital part of science and
engineering. Your laboratory notebook is a permanent record of what you did and
what you observed in the laboratory. Learning to keep a good notebook now will
establish good habits that will serve you throughout your career. Your notebook
should include recording of what you do, and why you did it. It is extremely
important that your notebook accurately record everything you did. A good test
of your work is the following question: could someone else, with an equivalent
technical background to your own, use your notebook to repeat your work, and
obtain the same results? For that matter, could you come back six months later,
read your notes, and make sense of them? If you can answer yes to these two
questions, you are keeping a good notebook. It is also important to maintain a
good laboratory notebook in order to protect your intellectual property. An
appropriately maintained laboratory notebook can often mean the difference
between gaining or not gaining recognition for a discovery. U.S. patent law
states that inventor-ship is determined by the "first to invent," not
the "first to file." The laboratory notebook can be the key piece of
evidence in helping to make that determination.” This key paragraph from this
source explains all that it focused on in this paper. It goes over good
practices with lab books and gives the ins and outs of how to be a good student
when it comes to reporting labs.
Kelley, Nicole. Sentence Structure of Technical
Writing. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, Fall 2006. PDF.
The main focus of this
presentation is to show how engineers should write in a formal manner. It goes
over steps such as: Plan your project before you begin drafting, Understand
basic qualities of good technical writing, use the examples presented to guide
you in your writing and revising process, Good writing is a habit that takes
time to develop, and practice makes perfect. This is obviously for engineers to
look over.
Lauer, James. "Communication in an Engineering
Career." Telephone interview. Mar. 2014.
I interviewed James Lauer, a Senior Manager at Caterpillar Inc. in charge
of teaching new managers the position and certain engineering techniques. This
man does a lot of presentations and teaching which deals with communication. So
the interview consisted of questions about his job and communication plays a
role overall and day to day. I also asked about any troubles he has with communication
at times. I also ask about each of the five general technical communications I
was researching and how he has used those from back in college to now in his
full career. This was very interesting information and really showed how basic
knowledge of these communication styles and really help you over your whole
career as a college student and a full engineer.
McKinley, Gareth H. Some Helpful Hints in Preparing
Scientific-Quality Plots for Reports by Hand or by Using Excel. Cambridge:
MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, Spring 2004. PDF.
Excel is a wonderful
tool for rapidly manipulating laboratory data. However it is helpful to
remember that it was designed with accountants in mind, not scientists. It is
really configured to manipulate financial data, and this is reflected in the
names used for many items. It takes some significant effort to make data tables
and plots into the form that is acceptable for reporting scientific data. Even
with this extra effort, the results are marginal at best. So this essay focuses
on help with excel and how it can be used in a helpful way when trying to use
it to reports findings in the form of graphs. All the helpful hints give
college students some much needed guidance to help them produce professional
looking reports.
Perelman, Leslie C. Effective Oral Presentations.
Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, n.d. PDF.
This presentation goes
of many basic rules that are very crucial to an effective oral presentation. It
covers topics like preparing the talk, knowing and analyzing the audience, the
introduction, the time, the conclusion, and the look of your visual. It also
shows the perils of PowerPoint and how to make your presentation the most
effective. This is for helping all engineers present data and results in a
presentation so that it is easy to understand and present.
Poe, Mya. Effective Written Communication:
Storyboarding a Technical Report. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering
Office, Sept. 2005. PDF.
The goal of oral
presentations and written reports is to explain a technical finding of the
information you are reporting. The power point gives good guidelines to writing
presentations and written reports so that they are effective to your audience,
they have good sentence structure, properly organized data, and explanation of
said data. This is for all engineers.
Sample Problem and General Advice for Homework. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, 24 Oct.
2001. PDF.
The purpose of this
handout is to give you a sample problem and some advice for writing problem
sets in all engineering fields. The attached solution shows you one way that
the homework can be written. This does
not mean that your homework has to look identical. This sample is merely a
guide. However, keep in mind that you
can receive full credit only when you show clearly what you did. In engineering you must get the right answer
and present it clearly. This shows a good example of problems engineers will encounter
and how to properly set them up and answer them. This is for college students
in engineering.
"Technical
Communications in Mechanical Engineering." Technical Communications in
Mechanical Engineering. MechE Department, n.d. Web. 03 Mar. 2014. <http://web.mit.edu/meugoffice/communication/>.
Engineering work is
critically dependent upon communication skills. Engineers must be able to
report their ideas and designs clearly to their coworkers, supervisors, and
customers. The format of engineering communications can vary widely, from
summaries of calculations, to short technical memos, to complete written
reports, to oral presentations, to drawings describing data or machinery. The
undergraduate curricula of the MechE Department include instruction in all of
these formats. The main focus of this site is to provide an information highway
to engineering students who need guidance with technical writing in the
mechanical engineering field. The audience is for all engineers and specifically
mechanical engineers that may or may not be students.
The Preparation of Engineering Problem Sets. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical Engineering Office, Mar. 2002.
PDF.
These documents
describe basic guidelines for formatting problem sets. This guide is for
teaching students how to correctly format your problem sets in an organized
fashion. These guidelines may be different for other teachers and schools, but
are a good base for starting problem sets properly. The audience is students in
engineering.
Wilson, David G. Wilson’s Guide for the Preparation of
Theses, Reports, Articles, and Papers. Cambridge: MIT Mechanical
Engineering Office, n.d. PDF.
Writing, presenting
orally, or a report are all ways you can formally transfer information. These
are some simple overall rules for optimum information transfer, a framework
that might help you to put these rules into practice, and some rules of
grammar. This guide just gives a short overview of the basic for main topics of
what to focus on certain reports and papers. This is for students in
engineering.
