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Lily Spitzer-Vanech

Dr. Tabitha Clark

ENGW: Advanced Writing in the Technical Professions

January 19, 2023

Lines of Inquiry in Mechanical Engineering

A discourse community is a wide group of people who have similar professional or

occupational interests and share their knowledge of those topics through a shared platform

members can easily access and contribute to. Swales went in depth about the requirements for a

discourse community as people in the past created different and vague definitions of them.

Swales stated that a discourse community must have a set of common public goals, ways of

communicating with all members, participation is mostly used to provide information and

feedback, has more than one genre to communicate information, acquired a specific lexis that is

understood by those involved in the community, and has varying levels of membership for

people with varying degrees of interest and expertise. A discourse community can be confused

with a speech community, which is based on people who share similar linguistic rules. Discourse

communities are important because it is a means for people from all over the world to share their

knowledge on topics practitioners, researchers, or people who just have interest in the topic want

to know more about.

When people study mechanical engineering, there are a lot of different topics to explore

such as energy, robotics, aerospace, manufacturing, automation, control systems, biomechanics,

etc. The discourse community, Advanced Robotics, publishes papers on robotic science and

technology, ranging from space, underwater robotics, to interactive robotics. This qualifies as a

discourse community because it has been peer reviewed, has a common set of public goals, and
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has varying membership options. One subject this journal discusses is adaptive motion of

animals and machines. Engineers can learn so much from designing robots that mimic animal

movement, while biologists can understand the adaptive control of animals using animal-like

robots. One article discusses the development of a soft climbing robot made of silicone that

behaves like an octopus and can grasp various objects and climb various columnar objects by

inching its trunk without sensing.

Another journal, Advances in Mechanical Engineering, is a peer-reviewed, open access

journal that publishes original research articles and reviews articles that cover all areas of

mechanical engineering. Their goals are to advance the understanding of mechanical engineering

by providing a platform that allows people to publish unique contributions to the field across a

variety of topics. One particular topic was biomechanics, which is an important topic to

understand because the medical field is constantly growing and developing with new

technologies to help people live better lives. One article discusses the status of commercially

available intelligently controlled hand rehabilitation robots and the future directions of the

technology.

One last journal is the Annual Review of Control, Robotics, and Autonomous Systems,

which consists of comprehensive reviews of significant theoretical and applied developments

that impact the engineering of autonomous and semiautonomous systems. There is a broad field

of robotics that is covered in this journal, some include theoretical and applied mechanics,

optimization, information theory, machine learning, computing, and signal processing. One topic

that came up in this journal was medial robotics, the different categories include surgical robots,

rehabilitation and assistive robots, and hospital automation robots. One article specifically
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discusses the medical robotics developed in China and the reasons why it has been growing there

exponentially.

I saw many different topics being discussed in these journals, but the one the interested

me the most was biomechanics. Understanding how the body works and applying that to devices

that can help those who need it has always been an interest of mine and something I wanted to

further develop. Some questions I have about biomechanics are:

 How many human organs can be replaced with a prosthetic? Which one is the most

complex and why?

 How are prosthetic limbs controlled? Does the person using them control it with their

muscles or is it cognitive?

 Can biomechanics advance through analyzing animals more than humans? If so, which

animal would be the most ideal to observe and why?