Research Paper Proposal

John Lauer

ENGL 250

Research Proposal

3/3/14

Technical Communications in Mechanical Engineering

               As many majors in college have, writing is a substantial skill that every college student must be sufficient in. This forces students to be active in learning to write better and specifically better in the styles and formats that they must write in for their specific major. Each major has a different writing style, along with different setups of memos, reports, presentations, and drawings that must be done in the correct format. How will other students in the mechanical engineering field know how to produce this writing? Obviously they will learn over time, but what better way to learn a lot in the beginning of your college career then to read a research paper giving a quick crash course of what kinds of technical writing will come up in the mechanical engineering field and how you should deal with them when the time comes to write them.

               My topic for research is “Technical Communications in Mechanical Engineering” and answers the question, “What technical writing do Mechanical Engineers do?” So the paper will go over five general types of communication that mechanical engineers encounter, which is the following: Problem Sets, Written reports, Oral Reports, Lab and Design Notebooks, and Graphical Presentation and Technical Material. The paper will cover the general concept of each writing style and communication technique, along with an explanation of the format of each of how they should be written and some tips on communicating with each communication style. So the technical and conceptual side of writing will be touched on so to help whoever is reading to actually produce quality writing in each format. Each of these have a very good chance of showing up in college and a future job as a mechanical engineer, so the write up of all of these together will help give a small refresher course of these different communications.

               This paper will be written with specific research from the internet from different credible sites, along with some scholarly sources, and some interviews with mechanical engineers. All of this will be pulled together to produce a very direct research paper that will be a great source to use when needing a reminder about these communication styles.