In Life Without Principle, Henry Thoreau laments hearing a speaker who chose “a theme too foreign to himself.” As a result, there was “no truly central or centralizing thought in the lecture.” A century and a half later, you may have encountered the engineering speaker who is lost in his own slides and resorts to reading them verbatim, or the engineer who, although capable of connecting with her audience, seems uninterested in doing so. In fact, that speaker may be you.
Engineers are smart people and their work is important. They make their accomplishments known through presentations to colleagues, bosses, customers, and the public. Their task, which is far more difficult than that of the typical public speaker, is to convey highly technical information in an often brief period of time. It is crucial that their formal presentations not be confusing, inaccurate, misleading, or boring. Heaped on that is the burden that the success of their entire endeavor may hinge on the first sentence uttered.
It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that an engineer must make a concerted effort to become a skilled technical speaker. And yet in our experience as engineering educators we have found an attitude among students and colleagues alike that technical speaking is an inherited gift. (“Wow, Tom is such a natural speaker, I wish I had his talent.”) What they don’t realize is that this seemingly natural speaking style is hard-earned, paid for by hours of preparation, rehearsal, and self-examination.
In our previous book, Engineering Writing by Design, we made the case that engineers can become good writers by applying familiar concepts from engineering design. The same is true for technical speaking. We claim that to speak like an engineer, you must think like an engineer. Thus, you already have the tools to become a good formal speaker; you must only learn to apply them. That is our purpose in this book: to teach you to apply to your speaking tasks the design skills you have worked so hard to develop. You may find this key observation intuitively obvious, but our experience is that for most this viewpoint is a revelation.
A public speaking task can be seen and approached as a design problem accompanied by requirements, constraints, protocols, and standards to meet, and an eventual customer to satisfy (the target listener). Engineers are deeply familiar with design-oriented thinking, and their experience with design processes can be brought directly to bear on even the most daunting presentation tasks. This approach provides a familiar framework for the classical elements of public speaking skill that are taught in university courses and training seminars.
We have carefully organized this book to take you through the steps involved in the speaking process, from conception to delivery and beyond. Each chapter covers one step, ending with a checklist to help you keep on task. The early chapters deal with the steps of engineering, designing, building, and optimizing your presentation, and rely heavily on familiar principles of engineering design. The later chapters deal with delivery and aftermath. At each stage we encourage you to develop rubrics to gauge your progress; examples are given in Chapter 1. We feel that if you follow the process from beginning to end, you will become a confident and capable technical speaker. A checklist covering the entire process appears in the appendix.
And now a little on what this book is not about. The general topic of “engineering speaking” is obviously very broad; we choose to concentrate only on “formal” engineering presentations. These would include such things as in-class presentations, thesis or dissertation defenses, presentations at professional conferences, or presentations to potential customers or funding agencies. Our purpose is not to address one-on-one conversations, conference calls, conversations around the lunch table, meetings chaired under parliamentary procedure, etc. Such things are important, and certainly some of the principles we put forth will apply to spoken communication in any engineering setting. But for these, and for the many other types of speeches you may find yourself giving — welcome speech, keynote speech, nomination speech, acceptance speech, farewell speech, eulogy — we refer you to the many excellent general books on public speaking.
Acknowledgments
We would like to thank Jennifer Byford for her many insightful and useful comments on the manuscript, and for contributing multiple examples and exercises throughout the book. Beth Lannon-Cloud offered constructive criticism on several versions of the manuscript; she also generated a simple rubric for rating presentations. Andrew Szymczak offered helpful feedback and suggested an example for Chapter 1. We are indebted to Josh Myers and Junyan Tang for carefully reading the manuscript and providing helpful comments. Gordon P. Fellows suggested an example for Chapter 3.
We are grateful for the work of several anonymous reviewers. Our Taylor & Francis editors Nora Konopka, Michele Smith, and Laurie Oknowsky provided much valuable guidance and support throughout the publication process. The cover designer was John Gandour.