Of Classrooms and Contexts: Teaching Engineers to Write Wrong

Classrooms, especially engineering classrooms, can be poor places for students to learn about writing. By their very nature as training grounds, engineering classes establish a misleading context for writing. Through the writing done for these classes, students learn to ignore their readers, to misunderstand the purpose of the writing they will do on the job, and to misconstrue the crucial process of revising their texts. Nevertheless, despite the liabilities that may hamper their efforts to teach students about writing, professors of engineering must not abandon their efforts to encourage clear writing. Neither teachers of engineering nor teachers of writing can alone turn students into capable writers. Working together, however, they may succeed.