Overview

If you are going to be a successful engineer, you'll have to be able to use language with ease to express yourself fluently, confidently, and effectively. This holds for both written and oral presentation. You can't do either really well unless you can do both quite well.

Thinking in the context of Chapter 4 controlling projects in terms of the future, in terms of ultimate results we come to a paradox. The immediate end of essentially all engineering work is paper.

"But how can that be?" you say. "Didn't somebody decide in the first chapter that engineering is not engineering unless it gets results unless it goes all the way through to meeting some human need? What happened to that idea?"

Well, anything as complicated as engineering has to be worked out carefully in just about every detail. There are many people involved who have to communicate effectively with each other if they are to work together. You saw in Chapter 3 that one engineer can hardly take a job all the way through even though he can never lose sight of the whole process at least, in general. So engineers each (specialists) have to pass on to the next one in the engineering cycle the results of their part of the work. (Engineers must also communicate with themselves individually, that is, store information for themselves).

In engineering, as in every other activity of modern civilization, paper is the medium whereby you do this. Our society lives on paper. We can't get along...