Since "engineer" is a personality type, you can spot it in a number of ways. The reading and writing I mentioned have a lot to do with it, particularly in the sense that attention to detail shows up everywhere. Spelling and punctuation are a really good indicator. Spelling and punctuation are taught to everyone in very much the same way. Most of it is actually learned by reading and remembering what's been read. People who are naturally inclined to ignore basics of spelling and punctuation and who don't absorb details of spelling and punctuation from what they've read (Nowadays, it's mostly managed by computers in published work.) probably won't do much better with other information. Information is an engineer's stock in trade.

That's not a hard and fast rule, but it's a clue.

When a real engineer attempts to write something, he generally attempts to impose some structure on what he's doing. It's generally a matter of habit, so I look for that.

I once mentioned that I was interviewing candidates on behalf of a client. I chatted with each interviewee for a short while, touching on points in his/her cover letter, and assuming everything in his resume to be true and correct. I then had each one read an article I'd gleaned from a magazine, and asked them to write a short paragraph summarizing what it said. I subsequently demonstrated a procedure on the testbench and asked each interviewee to write a paragraph summarizing what I'd demonstrated and what conclusions could be reached from the demo. If they were able to read and understand the article, they'd have noticed that the demo was merely a presentation of what the article had discussed. From discussing what they'd written, it was easy to tell whether their writing was poor because they were nervous or felt pressured, or whether they simply lacked the discipline to do the job. It's all about discipline, though, isn't it?

Engineering is a documentation task. Technicians do the soldering and the testing, and they record the results, but engineers write the spec's and evaluate the results, drawing conclusions from them. That's where the details live, and that's what's important. If a guy's writing is full of spelling, punctuation, and syntax errors, his attention to detail is probably just as weak.

As I said, it's a clue.

RE