Welcome to Writing for Engineering!

In this course we will learn various forms of technical writing specific to the engineering profession. We will read and discuss texts on engineering, technology, technical communication and science in order to explore ideas and identify compositional strategies. We will learn how to communicate our technical knowledge, plans, and ideas effectively and clearly in a professional manner to a variety of audiences. Assignments will include a technical description, a collaborative memo, a lab report, an engineering proposal, and a digital portfolio and self-assessment. You will create some of these individually and produce others in teams. You will also write a few short assignments, contribute posts to the course group forum, and review your peers’ work.

Learning Outcomes

• Acknowledge our class community’s range of linguistic differences as resources, and draw on those resources to develop rhetorical sensibility
• Enhance strategies for reading, drafting, revising, editing, and self-assessment
• Negotiate personal writing goals and audience expectations regarding conventions of genre, medium, and rhetorical situation
• Develop and engage in the collaborative and social aspects of writing processes
• Engage in genre analysis and multimodal composing to explore effective writing across disciplinary contexts and beyond
• Actively reflect upon the writing process in real time
• Practice using various library resources, online databases, and the Internet to locate sources appropriate to your writing projects
• Strengthen your research and techniques of composition (including evaluating, integrating, quoting, paraphrasing, summarizing, synthesizing, analyzing, and citing sources)