Purpose

If you read my analysis of my audience, the natural progression leads me to talk about purpose. It is something important in all of our lives, including our ability to write. Why are we here? Why am I writing this lab report? The answers to these questions build the foundation of our documents. You can be a great writer, using great vocabulary, varying sentence structure, and excellent grammar, but at the end of the day, none of that matters if you don’t know the purpose behind it.

The purpose should be the first thing that an engineer thinks about when writing a memo, lab report, or a set of instructions. Everything else should stem from the purpose. It is as if you are laying down a railroad for an approaching train. It helps you to stay on track and not veer away from the main focus of your document. If you are aware and au fait with your purpose, the elements of your writing will lean on it for support. The answer to the question “Why?”, gives answers to the rest of the questions that might come up down the line.

There were examples during Engineering Proposal Presentations when groups presented their project and had a very detailed cost analysis, drawing, description, but when asked the question “Why?”, suddenly their argument falls apart. As you can see below, our presentation had a very clear need statement that we introduced right after the introduction before anything else.

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