Teaching engineering students their own discourse

As we are all very aware, effective written communication is one of the ABET 2000 goals, and teachers everywhere are struggling to incorporate more writing into their courses. However, at this point, we should question whether simply adding "writing components" will make engineering students more effective writers. What these students really need is a deeper understanding of the discursive practices of engineering writing. They need to understand how, for example, audience and purpose affect issues such as readability, style, and format. They need to understand the conventions and strategies of professional engineering writing, and assigning students either a memo report, a proposal or a research paper without a thorough discussion of the rhetoric of these kinds of writing will do little to help them as writers. One way to help students grapple with these more complex issues is to assign a sequence of papers that engage them in research and writing about the discursive practices of their own field. In this paper, we discuss the need for such work, the theoretical underpinnings of such a paper, and a series of assignments that lead students to such an understanding.