Written Communications

No matter if an engineer did the best job in the world with a design, if the person responsible for the design cannot communicate the design effectively, then the design effort was wasted. That’s the reason that I gave to my Transport Processes Design course students for requiring that they paid attention to communications in their design reports equal to the attention they paid to technical aspects of their designs. And, I followed up by giving two equally weighted scores for each report, one for technical correctness and the other for communications ability. When it came to the final average grade for the course, communications counted for 40%.