The Presentation of Engineering Proposals

Abstract

Technical authors occasionally lament the time and effort engineers put into word processing their contributions. They spend inordinate amounts of time, as the authors describe it, not only on their written compositions, but also on using special word processing features to ‘prettify’ them. It seems they cannot resist using special fonts, unusual table styles, and other layouts to present their work. Inevitably, when the various pieces are collected from different members of the design team and collated by the authors, the texts are stripped down, so to speak, reformatted, and reorganised to conform with the overall style and structure of the whole proposal document. Along the way, the authors may rephrase the odd sentence or rewrite whole sections, which usually receives a good reception from the engineer writers, who like to see their text improved in this way. On occasion, however, the changes they make are greeted with protests from the offended engineer writers, who clearly dislike seeing their work changed. Certainly, some engineers show a proprietary attitude towards their writing, at times ‘fiddling’ with it to return it to its original form, even when reviewing later versions of it that have been changed by the authors. This textual ‘sparring’ reveals a tension over text ownership and control, that leads to rising passions and lively exchanges (rarely acrimonious) about proposal text.