A WOMAN engineer has been honoured for speaking in plain and simple English.

Corhyn Horsfall beat hundreds of other student engineers who were also tested on their presentation skills and ability to communicate effectively.

"We had to put our projects into plain and simple English for people to understand," said Corhyn, who works for NNC at Booth's Hall in Knutsford. "I spent about two weeks getting my presentation right and finding small simple words to replace the big ones."

But there were just some long words she could not do without.

In the end the title of her project - The finite element analysis of the hot isostatic diffusion bonding process between a Beryllium tube and a copper pipe - was the longest in the competition.

"I tried for ages to shorten it," said Corhyn, who set her sights on being an engineer at 16. "But I needed every word because if I took one out it changed the meaning.

Laughed

"My tutor laughed when I told him the title because the competition is about simplifying engineering terms and I had to use lots in one sentence."

But Karen Frost, awards officer for the Institution of Mechanical Engineers Queen's Silver Jubilee competition, said she had seen much longer titles over the years. "The awards were set up in 1964 and there've been a few long titles in that time," she said. "At least Corhyn's only took up two lines, others have been known to go on for half a page."

But Karen believes it is the industry not the engineer that is to blame for the long words.

"They have words that are very specific to engineering so they can't change them," she said. "Unfortunately they are usually rather long words or phrases."

It is a lesson Corhyn learned early in her four-year course at Liverpool University. "They have such technical words and sometimes I wondered what they were talking about," she said. "I'm used to it now but I'll always try to simplify long words because I just don't like them."