Michael Alley

• Pennsylvania State University

One common form of outreach by colleges of engineering is the ambassador program, whereby students interact with middle and high school audiences in an effort to promote STEM-related career choices. Although the impact of such programs on K-12 students' knowledge and attitudes has been examined, less is known about the impact on the ambassadors the...

The fourth edition of The Craft of Scientific Writing is designed to help engineers and scientists effectively write about their work. The book focuses on how to analyze audiences, especially what they know and why they are reading. The book also stresses how to craft each idea into a precise and clear sentence and how to connect those sentences in...

In response to the need for a diverse, highly skilled STEM workforce that can work collaboratively and communicate effectively, colleges of engineering have developed diversity-focused recruitment, retention, and outreach efforts. Many programs have also begun to emphasize technical communication skills. A national organization that integrates thes...

Many undergraduate engineering programs use presentations as a means of assessing students' learning and technical communication skills, but the task of identifying slide structures that foster the presenter's thinking about his or her topic has received little attention. In most cases, students create topic-subtopic structure slides that follow th...

The objective of engineering education is to educate students who are ‘ready to engineer’. This implies that students should be broadly prepared with not only deep knowledge and understanding of the technical fundamentals, but also the pre-professional skills required to be successful in the engineering workplace of today and tomorrow1. Part I of t...

Perhaps the most stinging criticism for a presentation is that the talk is boring. Many talks are boring because the speaker projects bulleted list after bulleted list. Soon after the presentation begins, the audience becomes overwhelmed by the sheer number of details. Equally important, because the details are simply listed in a bulleted column, t...

In the mid-nineteenth century, chalkboards were a novelty. Institutions would boast about having the only chalkboard in a 100-mile radius. At fi rst, audiences were excited just to have a chalkboard as part of the presentation. Over time, though, presenters started using the boards in more sophisticated ways: rulers to make lines, chalk tied to str...

Delivery is your interaction with the audience and with the room. Voice, gestures, eye contact, stance, movement—all of these contribute to delivery. How you deliver your presentation affects not only how intently the audience listens to you, but also whether your audience trusts you. According to Michael Faraday, “[Lectures] depend entirely for th...

Simply put, speech is what you say in a presentation. A speech targeted to the audience is essential for a presentation’s success. Consider J. Robert Oppenheimer’s early lectures given at California-Berkeley in 1929. Only 25 years old, but already well known for his work on the quantum theory, Oppenheimer began his teaching that first semester with...

fter his work at Los Alamos during the war, Richard Feynman began teaching at Cornell. During that first semester, he became depressed at how little research he was doing. He claimed to feel “tired”

The way that we as engineers and scientists design presentation slides is naturally evolving. When a presenter comes up with a new slide design that succeeds in a talk, those of us in the audience consider adoption. However, this natural evolution of effective slide designs in engineering and science has been painfully slow. One reason, as slide de...

On January 27, 1986, because of the low temperatures expected for the next morning’s launch of the space shuttle Challenger, engineers at Morton Thiokol requested a delay in the launch. From their examinations of previous launches, the engineers believed that the lower the launch temperature, the more likely that explosive gases from the solid boos...

[The lecturing of Boltzmann] was the most beautiful and stimulating thing I have ever heard.... He was so enthusiastic about everything he taught us that one left every lecture with the feeling that a completely new and wonderful world had been revealed.

Engineering educators often create slides for classroom presentations to instruct students. In turn, engineering students often create slides for classroom presentations to demonstrate what they have learned. Given how often presentation slides are projected and viewed by engineering educators and students, those slides should follow principles of...

This paper compares students' learning from a presentation that relies on the topicsubtopic slide structure versus students' learning from a presentation that follows an assertionevidence slide structure. In our experiment, two audiences heard the same recorded presentation, but one audience (48 participants) viewed topic-subtopic slides and anothe...

Teaching in higher education often involves giving a lecture that is accompanied by PowerPoint slides. It is common practice for slides to adhere closely to PowerPoint's defaults, but these and other similar designs violate principles of multimedia learning. In this article, the psychological theories that apply to slide comprehension processes are...

Although women make up more than half of the U.S. population, the percentage of women entering engineering is much lower. To address this discrepancy, the College of Engineering at Penn State has initiated an Engineering Ambassador Program that sends female engineering undergraduates to give talks in science and math classes within Pennsylvania hig...

Summary Explores how to have a technical community adopt a new communication strategy that challenges the common practice of PowerPointReveals the sources of resistance to that communication strategyFinds that resistance is diminished when learners see the strategy being used effectively by someone with credibility in that learner's community

Finds that the common practice of PowerPoint is heavily influenced by PowerPoint's defaults Finds that the common practice of PowerPoint does not follow cognitive principles of multimedia learning Shows that the assertion– evidence slide structure is much more in line with multimedia learning principles

Summary Finds that the common practice of PowerPoint is heavily influenced by PowerPoint’s defaultsFinds that the common practice of PowerPoint does not follow cognitive principles of multimedia learningShows that the assertion–evidence slide structure is much more in line with multimedia learning principles

Each year, the ASEE annual conference hosts hundreds of presentations to help disseminate engineering education research to the more than 3,000 attendees. This paper examines the slides from 72 presentations at the 2008 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition to determine common practices among engineering educators with regard to their presentation...

Graduate students face imposing hurdles in communicating their research. Unfortunately, many institutions do not have the resources to offer semester- long courses on presenting and documenting research. This paper presents the evaluation and subsequent improvement of two graduate student workshops on communicating research in engineering and scien...

Abstract Although many institutions have called for more undergraduate research, incorporating significant research experiencesinto undergraduate engineering curricula has proven to be challenging. This paper presents the results ofa two-year experiment in the College of Engineering at Virginia Tech to address thisproblem,by means of a research opt...

Tests have shown that using teaching slides with sentence headlines supported by visual evidence can significantly improve the transfer and retention of knowledge in large classes. However, some students will not attend class because these slides, when posted as notes, serve as a strong summary of the class. This paper presents the testing of activ...

The purpose of this study was to test a new slide design in a computer science course. Slides in the new design have a sentence headline supported by visual evidence, as opposed to the traditional design of a phrase headline supported by a bulleted list and sometimes an image. Identical content was presented to two sections of students. Each group...

For the slides in most technical presentations, presenters choose a single word or short phrase as the headline. This article challenges that practice with experimental evidence showing that using a succinct sentence headline to identify the main assertion of a slide leads to statistically significant increases in audience retention of that asserti...

In large classes, instructors often project and then post presentation slides to communicate important information. As recently shown, using teaching slides that have a succinct sentence headline supported by visual evidence, rather than the traditional phrase headline supported by a bullet list, has led to statistically significant increases in kn...

The current demand is not being met for researchers trained in rigorous, quantitative research. This shortage of educational researchers is critical in the area of engineering education, since very few doctorates in engineering have an education focus, and even fewer have significant assessment content in their educational programs. Previous public...

Pilot testing in a large geology course shows that a new sentence-headline design of presentation slides was more effective than the traditional phrase-headline design at teaching science to undergraduates. Rather than having a phrase headline supported by a bullet list, the new design relies on a succinct sentence headline supported by visual evid...

This workshop challenges the traditional design of presentation slides. Consisting of a phrase headline supported by a bullet list, the traditional design often appears in classroom and research presentations. In place of the traditional design, this workshop calls for a new design that consists of a succinct sentence headline supported by visual e...

The traditional design of presentation slides calls for a phrase headline supported by a bulleted list. Recently, many critics have challenged the effectiveness of this design. This article argues for a significantly different design that offers numerous advantages in most communication contexts but that is particularly well suited to technical pre...

Scitation is the online home of leading journals and conference proceedings from AIP Publishing and AIP Member Societies

Presentation slides are often used for teaching engineering classes, presenting engineering research, and explaining engineering designs. For those presentations in which the presenter desires to communicate and defend results, using a succinct sentence headline for all slides but the title slide has three advantages over relying on a phrase headli...

Presentation slides, when designed well, can significantly increase the amount of information that the audience comprehends. However, when the slide has type that can not be quickly read, the audience often gives up on the slide. Moreover, when the slide does not orient well, when the slide has too much information, or when the order of information...

An abstract is not available.

The purpose of scientific writing is to inform. Therefore, the attitude of the writer should be forthright; it should be sincere and straightforward. To be forthright in your writing, you have to control your tone. Tone is whatever in your language indicates the attitude that you, the writer, have towards your subject. Also, to be forthright you sh...

When discussing the organization of documents, Aristotle said, “A whole is that which has a beginning, middle, and ending” This approach is a good way to examine the organization of general scientific documents, such as reports and articles.

Instructions teach people how to perform processes such as machining a turbine blade, running a computer program, or handling a toxic chemical. Each of these examples points to the importance of well-written instructions. If the specifications for the turbine blade are unclear, the engineer will have to resubmit the job. If the software manual is d...

In scientific writing, precision is the most important goal of language. If your writing does not communicate exactly what you did, then you have changed the work. One important aspect of precision is choosing the right word. Another important aspect of being precise is choosing the appropriate level of accuracy. Just as you wouldn’t assign the wro...

While precision in scientific writing means saying what you mean, clarity means avoiding things that you don’t mean. Too often in scientific writing, a cloudy sentence disrupts the continuity and authority of an entire section. In scientific writing, each sentence builds on the ones around it. If one sentence is weak, your language falters and your...

During World War II, Niels Bohr gained an audience with Winston Churchill to warn him about the dangers of atomic weapons. Bohr realized that after the war an atomic weapons race would begin, and he wanted all countries to establish guidelines for containing these weapons. Despite the importance of the information that Bohr had to convey, Churchill...

To inform your audience, you have to use language that your audience understands. When you have an audience outside your area of expertise, it is often difficult to find familiar language. Why? Scientists and engineers work on particular crooks of particular ridges of particular mountains, and each mountain has its own special set of terms. These t...

Structure is not just the organization of details. Although organizing details in a document is certainly important, many well-organized documents fail to inform because the writer has not made strong transitions between the details or has not presented the details at the proper depth or has not placed the proper emphasis on the details.

Many people underestimate how difficult scientific writing is. One aspect that makes scientific writing difficult is the inherent complexity of the subject matter. Some subjects such as eddies in a turbulent flow are complex because they are so random. Other subjects such as the double helix structure of DNA are complex because they are so intricat...

A proposal presents a strategy for solving a problem. Giving specific advice about writing proposals is difficult because proposals vary so much. Proposals range from thousand-page reports to one-page forms. Some proposals are solicited by clients bent on solving a specific problem; others involve audiences who are unaware that a problem even exist...

There are two types of illustrations: tables and figures. Tables are the arrangements of numbers and descriptions in rows and columns. Figures are everything else: photographs, drawings, diagrams, graphs. This chapter discusses the advantages and disadvantages of each type. When presenting numerical data, you should assess the advantages of tables...

Many scientists and engineers mistakenly believe that scientific writing must be dull. Unfortunately, their writing reflects that misconception. It is dull, needlessly dull. Many scientists and engineers undercut the purpose of scientific writing—to inform—with sentences and paragraphs that drag and with discontinuities in language that trip reader...

The goals for illustrations are similar to the goals for language. First, you should make your illustrations precise. Precision does not mean having the most accurate illustrations. Rather, precision means having illustrations that best reflect the accuracy of the language. An equally important goal of illustrations is clarity. Too often in scienti...

Correspondence is an effective way to make requests and deliver specific information. When you respond to a job announcement, you write a letter. When you summarize a staff meeting, you write a memo. When you announce a sudden change in a schedule, you send an electronic mail message. Unlike a telephone conversation, correspondence presents the aud...

When you create a document on a computer, you are faced with many formatting decisions, from choosing a typeface to selecting the amount of white space that precedes a heading. In making these decisions, you want to choose a format that is easy to read, that is in character with the kind of document you have written, and that presents the work in s...

Conciseness follows from pursuing two other language goals: being clear and being forthright. When you make your writing clear and forthright, you also tighten it. Ridding sentences of pretentious diction such as “utilize” and “facilitate” leaves the more concise verbs “use” and “make.” Ridding sentences of abstract nouns such as “factor” and “natu...

No one can tell you the most productive way to get your words onto paper. Perhaps you can learn something from imitating the habits of professional writers, but the actual act of sitting down to write is individual. What has worked for Joan Didion or James Agee might not work for you.

This paper presents an assessment of a strategy to provide graduate students experience in teaching a formal class. Occurring in a large laboratory course taught during the senior year, the teaching experience occurred through two technical lectures, taught four times by each graduate student to more than fifty undergraduates during each occasion....

Web sites are becoming more important as teaching and learning tools in engineering. This paper discusses our assessment and subsequent improvement of one such educational web site, which Google ranks as the number one site (out of more than 8 million) for its topic area: engineering writing. In our assessment, we compared what pages faculty member...