Resources to Help Instructors Teach Writing
to Engineering and Science Students
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This page presents resources to help instructors teach students how to write as engineers and scientists. These resources include self-study guides and short films to assign to students, professional formats to use with course assignments, student models of documents, and rubrics for evaluating reports and other documents.
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Students in journalism and fiction writing take several courses on learning to write. In such courses, students write, receive feedback on that writing, and then revise. Because engineering and science curricula do not have room for several courses dedicated to writing in the discipline, what can we do to teach our students to write as professionals? Certainly, we can incorporate writing into laboratory and design courses. Shown in Figure 1 is a proposed process for such incorporation of writing:
- teach expectations for a type of technical document, such as a laboratory report or design report
- have students write such a document to a realistic audience, for a specific purpose, and with a professional format
- provide feedback on the writing of that document
- have the students use that feedback to revise the document.
Figure 1. An effective process for students in an engineering or science course to learn to write as engineers and scientists.
Step 1. Teach expectations for a specific type of engineering or scientific document
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Provided here are resources to help engineering and science instructors teach the expectations placed on students when writing a specific type of technical document, such as a laboratory report or design report.
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Step 2. Have students write a technical document with an authentic audience, purpose, and format
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Provided here are resources to help engineering and science instructors create an authentic writing assignment.
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Step 3. Provide valuable feedback on that document
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Provided here are resources to help engineering and science instructors provide assignment.
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Step 4. Have students use that feedback to revise the document
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Provided here are revisions of the sample graded report and proposal from Step 3. Students were asked to address all of the comments in the graded document and to submit a revision that would be appropriate to give to a job recruiter as a writing sample.
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