Engel conditions and symmetric tensors

In a recent study of Engel Lie rings, Serena Cicalò and Willem de Graaf have given a practical set of conditions for an additively finitely generated Lie ring L to satisfy an Engel condition. We present a simpler and more direct proof of this fact. Our main result generalizes this in the language of tensor algebra, and describes a relatively small generating set for the module generated by all n-th tensor powers of elements of a finitely generated ?-module M, in terms of a generating set for M.