The question that the article seeks to answer is what immunization skills would be the most beneficial for professional engineers. Throughout the article, the authors quote practicing engineers; one describes communication as "the life blood," Of engineering. The article also refers to other studies, like Barren (1 993), Dunn (1 998), and Porto (2000), which concluded that a majority of practicing engineers' time is spent communicating in written or oral communication.Another study interviewed professional engineers who described communication skills among engineering students as "really bad," which proved problematic for client presentations (Katz, 1993).
This information supports the authors' claim that communication is vital to the profession. One important inference the author makes is that instructors share the obligation to teach the necessary communication skills that engineers require. These skills not only allow the engineers to communicate effectively with one another, but also with their clients. In order to understand the line of reasoning general concepts must be understood.Oral communication does not fall into one category and engineers must be able to translate technical information for non-technical audiences. Knowledge of the current methods of teaching communicational skills in engineering classrooms is essential.
Readers must also be able to interpret data from tables in order to comprehend the results. The authors assume that practicing engineers know the most vital com animation skills from their experiences in the professional workplaces. The survey questions, however, did not ask how the engineers were taught these skills.As for Implications of the study, if people accept the authors line of reasoning, then the way that engineering students are taught to communicate Will begin to focus on more specific genres of communication that are important in professional workplace.
Table 2 summarizes the data found regarding the most important oral communication genres and skills for practicing engineers. Fifty percent of participants said public speaking (presentations, formal speaking, public seminars, etc. ) is an important communication genre and the rest of the genres include meetings, interpersonal speaking, training, and selling.Only one percent found other genres to be imperative.
For the authors' point of view, they are looking at the oral communication skills of engineers and they see it as an area that needs improvement. The authors are professors of communication, which suggests a possible bias in the research towards the importance of communication skills. The clarity of the authors' research is well-defined in that they wanted to know which types of communication are the most important to practicing engineers and what hypes of oral communication is used most frequently in the workplace.The research is accurate because the data in table 2 suggest that engineers are in agreement that public speaking and meetings are the most important genres of oral communication.
The depth of the information was limited because one thousand, six hundred alumni were mailed written interview protocols and only one hundred and twenty-three were returned with useful comments and insights. The fairness of the study is one-sided because only one branch of engineers, mechanical engineers, was interviewed.
