Engineering Discourse as Compared to the Amish:
Literary Merit of Technical Writing Technical communication is one of the fundamental literate activities of the engineering field. The skills and literacy involved in coding and building robots is spread across many divisions of engineering, whether it be mechanical, electrical, aerospace or an undecided major in the STEM field. To help introduce the necessary tools of inscription and the inscription process of programming a robot in both the academic and professional settings, the University of Central Florida mandates that all students take an Intro to Engineering course where they learn to read, write, and think like an engineer. However basic it may seem, one of the learning outcomes of …show more content…
Like most instructional texts, and hence all textbooks, the layout begins with the most basic information to the most complex. In the Old Order Amish community presented in Andrea Fishman’s work, Eli Jr. learns by recitation and repetition of bible hymns then by actually becoming generically literate, being able to read and write, through schooling. The engineering students learning to code and build robots, parallel this learning structures because at first they copy code from the textbook to see it in action then they slowly learn how to write similar programs until they reach a certain complexity and …show more content…
In the lab setting, the outputted text must be exactly as the instructor or instruction material requires even if it still shows the same skill if creativity had intervened. The lack of originality in this situation is directly comparable to the the lack of inspiration in the Amish community. From Fishman’s research, it is evident that the Amish bring in no new information and are left with only objectivity and standard formats for their writing. For example, the Amish written discourse, in the form of letters, is extremely rigid in its format among the members of the community beginning with weather and ending in an Old Amish Proverb. The rigidity faced by engineers learning code in the class room is just as present. Changing the output text from the code to something a little more humorous, such as “I, the Wizard of Oz, say the answer is 10,” instead “The answer is 10” will result in chastisement by the teacher’s assistant. Amish accept literacy as being able “synthesize what is read” (Fishman). As previously stated, engineers that are learning to code, paraphrase, for lack of a better term, lines of code and texts until their skill supersedes the classroom setting and allows them to experience new topics that the Amish will never come into contact
Literary Merit of Technical Writing Technical communication is one of the fundamental literate activities of the engineering field. The skills and literacy involved in coding and building robots is spread across many divisions of engineering, whether it be mechanical, electrical, aerospace or an undecided major in the STEM field. To help introduce the necessary tools of inscription and the inscription process of programming a robot in both the academic and professional settings, the University of Central Florida mandates that all students take an Intro to Engineering course where they learn to read, write, and think like an engineer. However basic it may seem, one of the learning outcomes of …show more content…
Like most instructional texts, and hence all textbooks, the layout begins with the most basic information to the most complex. In the Old Order Amish community presented in Andrea Fishman’s work, Eli Jr. learns by recitation and repetition of bible hymns then by actually becoming generically literate, being able to read and write, through schooling. The engineering students learning to code and build robots, parallel this learning structures because at first they copy code from the textbook to see it in action then they slowly learn how to write similar programs until they reach a certain complexity and …show more content…
In the lab setting, the outputted text must be exactly as the instructor or instruction material requires even if it still shows the same skill if creativity had intervened. The lack of originality in this situation is directly comparable to the the lack of inspiration in the Amish community. From Fishman’s research, it is evident that the Amish bring in no new information and are left with only objectivity and standard formats for their writing. For example, the Amish written discourse, in the form of letters, is extremely rigid in its format among the members of the community beginning with weather and ending in an Old Amish Proverb. The rigidity faced by engineers learning code in the class room is just as present. Changing the output text from the code to something a little more humorous, such as “I, the Wizard of Oz, say the answer is 10,” instead “The answer is 10” will result in chastisement by the teacher’s assistant. Amish accept literacy as being able “synthesize what is read” (Fishman). As previously stated, engineers that are learning to code, paraphrase, for lack of a better term, lines of code and texts until their skill supersedes the classroom setting and allows them to experience new topics that the Amish will never come into contact