Teaching Writing to Engineers and Scientists
in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
Michael Alley
Published January 2025*
Updated January 2026
Published January 2025*
Updated January 2026
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the way that we should teach writing to engineering and science students. This essay discusses three major changes to that teaching.
1. As instructors, we should expect that many (if not most) students will use AI on our writing assignments. As my own surveys have found, many engineering students are using AI to help them write assignments. Just as I am fine with students using calculators to help them solve technical problems, I am open to students using AI to help them write assignments. However, my acceptance of students using AI depends both on the audience, purpose, and occasion of the document and on the portion of the writing process in which AI is used. In general, the writing process consists of four stages: researching and planning, drafting, revising, and proofreading. In the latter stages of writing, I am fine with students using AI programs such as ChatGPT to correct grammatical errors, eliminate needless words, and strengthen connections between ideas. In addition, I am fine with students using AI tools as one means to mine for source material (as long as students verify those sources). However, I do not want students to use AI to draft major assignments, especially in my technical courses. The main reason here is that during the drafting process, engineers and scientists discover insights about the technical content, thereby deepening their understanding of the content. If students have AI draft the documents, the students miss that learning. 2. Writing assignments should be documents that AI cannot easily draft. Artificial intelligence is effective at drafting a document with content for which much public knowledge exists. For that reason, gone are the days in which students select the topics and audiences of their writing assignments. If you allow students to do so for an assignment, you will be reading a lot of ChatGPT. For a number of years in my technical writing courses, I had engineering and science students select a topic to research for the semester. Students would write a proposal on why they should research that topic, do a presentation on that topic, and then write a final report on that topic. However, about ten years ago, I abandoned that strategy for another used at MIT and the University of Michigan. In this newer strategy, my writing assignments shadow assignments in a technical course. Now, all of my writing students are also enrolled in a junior-level design course, and the assignments they submit (an initial design report and a proposal) are the same assignments that they submit to the technical course. Because each student team has a unique design and because the content for the writing assignment arises from the process that each team uses to develop that design, artificial intelligence has difficulty capturing the technical precision and emphasis. Moreover, because the assignments have a combination of technical audiences with different levels of familiarity with the content, artificial intelligence has difficulty targeting all those audiences (unless the students specify so in their prompts). 3. Writing assignments should deepen the student's understanding of the content during the drafting stage. Researchers often comment on how much they learn by writing a research paper or proposal. In such situations, although the researchers have ideas at the start of the writing process, the process itself (particularly the drafting stage) shapes and deepens the researcher's understanding of those ideas. Since the introduction of ChatGPT in November 2022, I have worked with the design instructors to have the process of writing our initial design report and design proposal increase the students' technical understanding of the design process. *AI was not used to draft or revise this essay.
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Michael Alley is a teaching professor in the College of Engineering at Pennsylvania State University. The author of The Craft of Scientific Writing (Springer, 2018), he has taught more than 200 writing courses and workshops to engineers and scientists at universities, laboratories, agencies, and companies in sixteen countries that span four continents. The two images shown arise from writing workshops that he has taught in China and Norway. |