Engineer, novelist, teacher: Alumnus’ career path has led him to teach engineers to write

The first — and most difficult — step in teaching engineers how to write, according to engineer-turned-writing instructor Brad Henderson, is getting them to believe they can do it at all.

“There is a stereotype that for some reason engineers aren’t good writers,” he said. “I’m going to tell you that’s not true. For most of my engineering students, their core writing skills, as far as precision and accuracy, are on the whole of a high quality. But many are math-based thinkers, and there’s a difference between math-based thinkers and non-math-based thinkers.”

For example, an engineering student and a history major might sit down to write an expository essay. The history major may be reading the piece with an eye to interesting insights and arguments, connections with other works of literature and elegant word and structure choices. The prospective engineer, by contrast, is likely to view the essay through a mathematician’s eyes, looking for converging lines of discussion that provide a chunk of useful information, according to Henderson, who graduated from the Master of Professional Writing (MPW) program at USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences in 1989.

A former aerospace engineer who has worked for over a decade as a writing lecturer at the University of California, Davis, Henderson understands how tricky it can be for the analytical left side of the brain to meet the more creative right side. Having been, at different points in his life, an aerospace design engineer, a technical training specialist and a full-time novelist, Henderson’s career path has bounced between the scientific and the literary for decades.

Now, with his new book, A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers:  Sentence Algebra & Document Algorithms (Springer, 2020), and his new career as an external writing consultant for engineering firms, Henderson hopes to help aspiring and current engineers improve their writing in the context of their careers.

“I’m on a mission to get engineering writing established as a genre,” he said.

From engineer to poet

Henderson comes from a family of engineers. His father and grandfather were both engineering professors, and during his undergraduate years at California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, Henderson felt he ought to enter the field as well, despite his desire to foster his more creative energies.

“I always loved writing, especially novels and poetry. It was something I almost kept as a secret to myself because it wasn’t very practical,” Henderson remarked. He ended up striking a balance between his “right-brain passion” and “left-brain aptitude,” earning a bachelor’s degree in engineering with an English minor.

After graduating from college, Henderson took a long bicycle trip around Europe and kept a daily journal log of his travels — and realized how much he enjoyed writing. 

“It was the first time I wrote every day, and it was a transformative experience,” he said.

His first job out of college was as a design engineer for an aerospace firm. But after several years, he quit that post to try his hand at being a full-time writer. During this time, he wrote his first novel and began looking at creative writing graduate programs. Despite being what he called a “very nontraditional applicant,” he was accepted to the MPW program.

Although he was primarily interested in novels and poetry, Henderson said he was glad he was able to gain training in other writing styles, as well.

“Not only did I get a chance to study fiction and poetry, I got training in dramatic structure, screenplays, and things like that,” Henderson explained. He also studied technical writing because “you gotta eat.”

After completing the program, which has since closed, Henderson took a full-time lecturer position at the University of California, Irvine, where he taught writing and public speaking for engineers.

“I realized then that I really loved teaching, but I still wanted to become a novelist,” he said. To do so, he drew on the connections he made while attending USC Dornsife. He became friends with MPW faculty members James Ragan and John Rechy, and he attended Rechy’s private workshop for several years after graduating from the program.

Writing with the left brain

Henderson tried to write another novel but was getting discouraged. When his wife decided to attend grad school, he got a job with Hewlett-Packard as an in-house training consultant for technicians and engineers. He stayed at HP for most of the ’90s, designing and managing proprietary hardware and software classes by day and at night reworking his first novel, which was eventually picked up by a “reputable small press in California,” he said. It was at this point he started thinking about returning to the classroom.

“I had liked teaching writing at a university, and UC Davis ended up having a job similar to the one I had at Irvine. Being a STEM writing specialist and also having an engineering degree — there’s not a lot of people like me teaching at universities,” he explained.

According to Henderson, one of the key assets to getting the UC Davis job was his USC degree.  “That brand — it really helped,” he said.

During this time, Henderson was still writing poetry and fiction, but he also began to kick around a new idea — an approach to teaching sentence-level writing skills to engineers. It would be founded on their analytical and logistic “left-brain” thinking, rather than the more artistic methods usually taught in traditional humanities courses.

“I noodled on it. Nearly everything in this world has a mathematical model inside it. That’s what engineers do — they try to figure out what the key is and model it. I considered the structures under the English language and came up with a unique way of using math symbols, math-based metaphors, and so on to teach sentence-level writing. I thought it would appeal to engineers because it taught writing through the universal language of math,” he said.  “I then expanded the method to include essential workplace documents.”

He developed his idea into A Math-Based Writing System for Engineers, which aims to teach engineers how to write successfully for their jobs in the industry. The book uses symbols, equations, blueprints, flow charts and other concepts engineers are familiar with in order to break down the fundamentals of writing in their profession. For example, a section on “sentence algebra” uses variables and algebraic formulas to convey sentence design using nouns, verbs, adjectives and other parts of speech.

Quick and concise: writing tips for engineers

According to Henderson, engineers need to be concise, using a very pared-down writing style to convey content quickly and meaningfully: Bottom-line recommendations often go first, documents for managers should not exceed one page, and proposals need a multi-stage architecture. These fundamentals of engineering writing — which play to the traits of science-based thinking — often cause engineers to do badly in traditional writing courses, thus leading to a sense, on the engineer’s part, that he or she can’t write at all.

“I have to help the engineers take what they learned in literary classes and apply it to engineering documents. I spend a lot of time teaching my students about communicating a message to a target audience — especially a busy one with a short attention span that wants the ending first before the rest of the story. Engineering students don’t have to write as much as a liberal arts majors, so it doesn’t come as easily to them.” However, Henderson added that since engineering work usually involves writing documents, especially emails, on a near-daily basis, engineers will gain fluidity on the job.

For now, Henderson plans to continue teaching writing to engineers, but with more emphasis on engineers in industry. Although he has not yet gotten the blockbuster novel deal he dreamed of, the excitement of having his new book published widely by a large publisher is good for now.

“I’ve decided that this might be my ‘big book.’ It was really weird because I had always thought the ‘big book’ was going to be a novel, but I was redirected in a way, and I’m pretty excited about it. I never would have imagined I’d be the author of an unorthodox system for teaching engineers how to write,” he said.  “But that’s how things added up.”