Writing the Engineering Research Article
What do published engineering researchers actually do when they write? What they really do, sentence by sentence, section by section, across an entire paper.
This book answers that question using a corpus of 163 engineering research articles comprising approximately 610,000 words; it reveals the patterns that define good engineering papers.
One problem is most academic writing guides are built around the IMRDC model (Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion, Conclusion) borrowed from the social sciences. But engineering papers don't work that way. Only 1.2% of the articles in this corpus follow a full IMRDC structure. The vast majority organise their content under technical headings such as Finite Element Analysis, Computational Domain, Experimental Programme. They blend methods, results, and interpretation into a single integrated flow.
The corpus analysis spans nine engineering sub-disciplines, from aerospace to chemical engineering, and identifies five distinct paper structures (Theory + Experiment, Theory/Simulation, Experimental, Analysis/Evaluation, and Thematic), each with its own logic, its own section balance, and its own rhetorical demands. Whether you're writing a computational fluid dynamics paper or a structural testing study, you'll find your paper type here, along with specific, data-driven guidance for every section you need to write.
Across 16 units, the book covers every stage of the engineering research article: macrostructure and headings, abstracts, introductions, mathematical and theoretical development, experimental and computational methods, results and interpretation, the validation move unique to engineering, discussion, and conclusions. It also examines cross-paper features that most writing guides ignore entirely - how tense shifts from section to section, where figure references cluster and why, how citation density changes across the paper, how hedging gives way to boosting as the argument builds, and how authorial presence strengthens from Introduction to Conclusion.
This book is for graduate students writing their first journal article, postdocs refining their publication strategy, and experienced researchers who want to understand the conventions they've absorbed intuitively. It is also invaluable for non-native English speakers navigating the rhetorical expectations of international engineering journals. The approach is descriptive, not prescriptive: the corpus shows you what is common so you can decide what is right for your study.
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