On the floor, writing and engineering don’t appear to have a lot in widespread. But the hyperlink between the 2 is greater than obvious to Suzanne Lane ’85, who’s been director of MIT’s Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication (WRAP) program since 2013.
“I made our program’s motto ‘Building tomorrow’s world in words,’” she says. “Writing and communicating is invention, and it shapes our relationships. It shapes our material world. Almost everything that happens in the world is first a plan that then has to get articulated.”
WRAP, a part of Comparative Media Studies/Writing (CMS/W), improves college students’ communication expertise by way of 4 communications-intensive undergraduate necessities. “We help students understand the central genres in their discipline,” she says. “How do you make those genres—say, a white paper or a presentation—work effectively? How do you design your writing for your audience?”
Trained each as an engineer and a author, Lane has lengthy cherished each pursuits. “I heard a lot as a kid that I should be an engineer, because I was very good at math and I was often modeling and inventing things,” she says. “And I always loved to read. Summer, everybody else would be outside. I would be like, ‘Great. I can just sit inside and read all day.’”
At MIT, the place she majored in chemical engineering with a focus in literature, she discovered an brisk group of like-minded folks. “It was creative and exciting and incredibly social, and just a lot of fun,” says Lane. “I had the most wonderful instructor [for expository writing], Kate Burnett … it was a great joy to me that when I came back years later, I got to teach that same class.”
Lane labored in engineering for a number of years, then obtained an MFA in inventive writing from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and a PhD in English with a deal with rhetoric from UMass Amherst. Rhetoric, or understanding how writing and narrative will be made to work higher, is “a very engineering question but applied to communication,” she says.
After educating in Harvard’s expository writing program, she returned to MIT in 2008 to hitch WRAP. When not educating, she research learn how to enhance communication training by way of Archimedia, WRAP’s analysis arm. WRAP’s total efforts not too long ago earned a certificates of excellence from the Conference on College Composition and Communication.
“In order for people to work together, they have to be able to communicate,” she says. “They have to literally be on the same page.”