Beyond WI: Building an integrated communication

To optimize learning to write like engineers, undergraduate engineering students need to develop a conscious awareness of alternative writing practices and their strengths and limitations in different contexts, something that is unlikely to come about either in the workplace alone or in one writing course alone. Needed, then, is an engineering curriculum with writing integrated throughout. What follows is a case study of one attempt to integrate writing throughout the curriculum in a department of civil and environmental engineering. This department\´s "beyond WI to department-wide" model of writing is still in the early stages; the case study is less a textual account of writing outcomes than it is an account of the sociohistoric institutional conditions that led to the creation of this model and of the reasons for rejecting a model of writing instruction that relies on only two or three writing courses. The model in the case study is contrasted with other models.