“Here We Show”: Teaching Engineering Students to Reason With an Audience

Abstract

Recent linguistic analyses of technical journal articles suggest that discourse conventions of these articles are evolving, rather rapidly in some fields, to include more use of first-person and more active voice verbs. This paper draws from both the recent linguistic research, and from rhetorical theory, to provide a framework that illuminates specific reasoning functions of the interactive dimension of engineering texts. First-person discourse performs critical functions for signalling motivation, novelty, experimental design, and analytical reasoning. Additionally, imperatives, such as “note that,” also perform important functions such as emphasizing significant results, highlighting the relationship between empirical data and theory, and explaining error and uncertainty. Indeed, the persuasiveness of these texts would be diminished without the metadiscourse markers signalling the dialogic nature of engineering reasoning. Consequently, teaching students the functions of first- and second-person discourse in engineering articles can not only help them better adapt to audiences, but also help them better learn how engineers reason.