Students Writing for Professional Practice: A Model for Collaboration Among Faculty, Practitioners, and Writing Specialists

This paper presents the principles, procedures, materials, and assessment of a new approach to improve the teaching of writing in engineering. The Civil Engineering Writing Project aims to improve students’ preparation for writing in industry by developing new teaching materials that can be integrated into existing civil engineering courses. With collaboration among engineering practitioners, applied linguists, and engineering faculty at four universities, the project draws on multiple perspectives to analyze writing and develop teaching materials. Phase 1 of the project investigated differences between practitioner and student writing in a large collection of texts and identified the most serious student weaknesses. Phase 2 of the project, currently underway, develops materials to address those weaknesses and evaluates their effectiveness. Student writing after the use of the materials is assessed with multiple measures, including linguistic analysis of specific language features and holistic evaluation of effectiveness by engineering practitioners. After initial piloting with seven courses, all quantitative assessments have found significant improvement in student writing. Student comments suggest the materials also challenge their misconceptions about writing in engineering. Although the project focuses on civil engineering, the principles behind the project and the procedures for materials development and assessment are applicable to any engineering discipline.