2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

While engineers are learning the vocabulary of the profession, understandably, they want to practice, and perhaps show their professors that they are proficient. This leads to student writing that is overly complicated and full of jargon. This is not the type of document that would be clear to the public, or even to a professional outside of the narrowly focused field of the particular engineer. After graduation, engineers’ writing becomes exponentially more important. Often approval of projects relies on residents’ or clients’ understanding of engineers’ work. For example, an engineering firm completing an investigation of an important health concern such as looking into a cluster of cancer cases, air pollution, or water pollution in a neighborhood, but the community fails to mobilize because the engineers were not clear in their presentation of the data and health risks. The plain language movement arose from the legal field and the need to provide more understandable documents free of legal jargon and has since been adopted by many other fields, especially in public health and other healthcare professions, where understanding information about a treatment plan or how to take medications can have serious or even fatal consequences. As engineers are also often involved with public health and environmental health initiatives, encouraging engineering students and professionals to think about how best to explain projects and concepts in a culturally and linguistically appropriate way, as well as how to ask for feedback, local knowledge, and other collaborative communications is an important skill.

At this college, the science and engineering librarian had been trained in plain language through a Plain Language for Health workshop offered by the Center for Health Literacy Research and Practice at Tufts University School of Medicine. She used these skills to create a plain language workshop appropriate for engineering students. The junior civil engineering students had met with the librarian early in the semester to discuss library resources and research paper topics, and so had a rapport with her. Later in the semester, the librarian came again to the class to present the importance of cultivating a sense of cultural humility and using plain language, and to run through several examples of how plain language techniques could be applied to civil engineering. Students were then encouraged to use the plain language techniques in subsequent assignments.

This paper and presentation will discuss the importance of introducing new engineers to plain language resources and methodology, as well as some resources that instructors can use in their classrooms. An example of a classroom exercise will be conducted.