Engineering Enhancements
The Shackouls Technical Communication Program

New presentations and resources
Program Overview

Engineers must be able to communicate. Recent surveys conducted by professional engineering societies and programs confirm that practicing engineers regularly spend between 55% and 70% of their time engaged in active, on-the-job communication. And, at the local level, veteran MSU engineering professors routinely report that the premier complaint from industry and graduate academia about MSU engineering graduates is poor communication skills. What does this mean for an engineer's education? Simply put, no matter what core engineering skills students master, such skills mean little unless these fledgling engineers can effectively communicate what they know in a variety of settings.

The Mississippi State University College of Engineering's Shackouls Technical Communication Program (TCP) exists to prepare engineering students for the writing and speaking situations they will face as working engineers. Begun in 1999, the TCP chiefly consists of three related efforts:

Technical Communication Precepts

  • Strong communication skills are essential to a successful engineering career; developing these skills takes practice and diligence.
  • Writing is inherently a process; the most important parts of this process occur before we physically begin to write.
  • In the context of technical communications, a concise, direct, appropriately formal writing style is always preferable to wordy, overly complex prose.
  • Contentual and mechanical precision and thoroughness are the responsibility of the writer.
  • Our audiences determine everything about the documents and presentations we create; we write and present for our audiences, not for ourselves.
  • Regardless of the circumstances that produce them, written documents often serve as documentation; as such, they live on after their composition and can reflect a great deal about author, situation, and organization. The details that the writer includes and the clarity with which these are expressed have a direct impact on the usefulness of the document and its reflection on everyone involved.