Motivating engineering students to write technical papers

Traditional techniques and procedures used to teach engineering students to write technical papers has not been successful in either motivating students to write or to get them to write effectively. The traditional methods are not showing the students the type of writing they will do as practising engineers. If technical writing is presented to engineering students during their junior year they will have sufficient engineering knowledge and if it is presented with structure similar to that used to teach engineering topics they will be more motivated to learn how to write effectively. Also if there is a specific goal set for the students, such as IEEE Student Paper Contests or a local Engineering Conference with a student paper session. We have developed a junior level course in technical writing for electrical engineering students. This course developed a very structured approach that specifically used engineering teaching techniques to help students understand writing and showed them how to apply it to engineering. Results of the course were very encouraging. Students wrote technical articles and submitted them to IEEE Paper contests and local conference student paper sessions. The first class taught implementing this method had 24 students, 17 of them being foreign born. All students showed more excitement at the end of the course than seen in other classes, and the students packaged the collection of papers and published them as a magazine at the campus copy center. Additionally, 7 of the student papers were awarded prize money in IEEE contests.