Communication & Writing Skills for Engineers 2012

Royal Orchid Sheraton Hotel & Towers, BangkokManagers, engineers, attorneys, and other highly paid workers spend up to 85% of their time writing, or reading other people’s writing. The cost to an organisation of writing is an average of $150 per page. So a 10-page report costs $1,500 to write. But what is the cost of a poorly written report?

• An oil company spent hundreds of thousands of dollars developing a new pesticide... only to discover that the formula had already been worked out five years earlier - by one of the same company’s technicians. He wrote his report so poorly that no one had finished reading it

• A nuclear plant supervisor ordered ‘ten foot long lengths’ of radioactive material. Instead of getting the ten-foot lengths it needed, the plant received ten one-foot lengths, at a cost so great it was later classified

• Prof D Winsor showed ‘a history of miscommunication’ to be one of the root causes of the Challenger disaster in 1986

People form an impression of a presenter and his message within 3 – 30 seconds. If it’s a poor impression, people will disengage from the presentation. If that happens, the presentation, the report and the information are largely ignored. What is the cost of that?