How to write an engineering essay
A lot of students, when given the task of writing an engineering essay, make a lot of mistakes when writing their paper. When writing an engineering essay, it is recommended that you conduct a plan for your essay, and not just begin by typing your name, the essay title, and anything related to the topic that comes into your mind.
Planning your essay will enable you to write a paper, which has points and ideas that flow coherently. This guide will provide you with important tips on how you can write a high quality-engineering essay by directing you on how to plan, structure the paper, and write your points and ideas coherently.
The decision to write an engineering essay could be because the essay is part of your courses continuous assessment, application requirement, personal writing on trending topics, or a publication article in a periodical or newspaper column.
The objective of your engineering essay should be decided before starting the paper. The objective is the main information, which you want the reader to know using the essay. Remain focused to your objective and the reader from the start of your essay to the end. Structuring your engineering essay well will assist you in keeping the audience and the objective in mind in your essay. An engineering essay has the same writing structure as scientific writing. The following will help you understand how to write an engineering essay and how to structure it:
Abstract
Provides the summary of what will be discussed in the essay. It is important that you structure it well because it is from this section that a reader will decide to continue reading the essay or stop. When writing your abstract, summarize the objective of your essay including examples supporting your argument, methods used to collect data used in the paper, research findings, and conclusions containing implications of the results.
Introduction
An introduction provides you with a chance to instill interest in your essay topic. This is the best area to provide background information about your topic to enable the reader to understand the reason that prompted you to write the essay. An introduction of a journal essay will provide a review of current literature to define transition or difference in knowledge. When writing this section of the essay, ensure that you refer to previous works by other writers, and include reference of the sources. It is important that you avoid plagiarism because it is a serious offence.
Material and Methods
Learning how to write an engineering essay is not just about writing the essay itself. It also involves explaining where you got information from. The methods and steps used to solve the objective of the essay are discussed in this section of the essay. However, this section does not include any results. Ensure that you provide a brief description of methods used and a justification of the steps that you followed when writing the essay. This is the section where you describe the statistical or analysis techniques you used when providing interpretation of research findings. In case your essay has findings from an experiment, this is the right place to describe the methods and equipment you used to the reader. The description should contain enough details that can enable the reader to reproduce the experiments in another laboratory. For example, in a stress analysis problem, your description should include the steps you took in modeling the problem, simplifications and assumptions made during the experiment, boundary conditions, and considerations for the material used.
Results
When presenting your research or experiment findings, utilise graphs or images to support your findings. Label all images and graphs used to present findings by including scales and units. A detailed caption when presenting findings in an engineering essay is important because it helps a reader who is not familiar with how findings are presented to understand them.
Discussion
This section should focus on the reader by taking him back to the essay’s objective, and provide a description of the results in addition to showing how they relate to the topic of the essay. This is the section where you discuss the findings and anomalies encountered during your research. When writing the engineering essay, you need to relate these findings to previous research, and show how it relates to the discussion and topic of the essay.
Conclusion
Every essay must contain a conclusion paragraph. It summarizes what has been discussed in the essay. A conclusion can be in bullet points providing the recommendations of the problems discussed.
Referencing or Bibliography Section
After completing the essay, you need to include a list of all the references used in the essay. There are various referencing styles, which include APA, MLA, Chicago, Turabian and Harvard. The following is an example of writing a reference or bibliography in various styles:
- APA: Creme, P., & Lea, M. R. (2008). Writing at university: A guide for students. Buckingham: Open University Press.
- MLA: Creme, Phyllis, and Mary R. Lea. Writing at University: A Guide for Students. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2008. Internet resource.
- Chicago: Creme, Phyllis, and Mary R. Lea. 2008. Writing at university a guide for students. Buckingham: Open University Press.
- Turabian: Creme, Phyllis, and Mary R. Lea. Writing at University A Guide for Students. Buckingham: Open University Press, 2008.
- Harvard: CREME, P., & LEA, M. R. (2008). Writing at university a guide for students. Buckingham, Open University Press.
After you have finished writing your engineering essay, read your work to correct any grammar or spellings mistakes in the paper. This is important because poor grammar or spellings mistakes can make you lose many marks in your essay. In summary, when writing an engineering essay, make sure you plan your essay before starting it. After you have completed your essay outline, identify the objective of the essay and target audience. Make sure that you avoid plagiarism by including references on all sources used in the essay. Finally proofread your essay before submitting it.
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There are more engineering essays in our engineering essay repository.