Session 13b5
Incorporating Writing Skills into the Engineering Curriculum
†
††
††
†
††
Abstract - One of industry's most common complaints about engineers is their lack of writing skills. Oakland University is currently involved in a new joint effort between the Engineering and the English Departments to improve engineering students' writing skills. This effort involves the use of teaching assistants from both departments. Teaching assistants from the Engineering Department grade the technical component of laboratory reports, while teaching assistants from the English Department grade the writing component, including organization, clarity, grammar, usage, and spelling.
The length of lab reports is restricted to five pages, to ensure that students do not over-write. Specially prepared grading sheets offer a rubric by which the writing component is carefully evaluated and graded. After the return of the corrected reports, all students falling below a specified grade level must revise the report, following all suggestions for improved organization and clarity, and then re-edit it, correcting all errors.
At the beginning of each laboratory period, the English
Department teaching assistant also gives a twenty-minute lecture to the lab groups about writing strategies, organization, sentence structure, and common errors found in students’ reports. Preliminary indications are that grammatical errors in laboratory reports decline significantly as the semester progresses, while writing styles show marked improvement. This collaborative effort between departments should serve as a model for other universities to improve the written communications skills of their engineering graduates.
The work involved in initiating this project was recognized with an NSF FIE '98 New Faculty Fellow Award. The proposal for the project was supported by the Deans of the
School of Engineering and the College of Arts and Sciences in a proposal to the Provost of Oakland University, who, recognizing its importance, has funded it for three years.
poor writing skills. Reports, for example, are poorly written, rife with misspellings, redundancies, and grammatical errors.
Instruction manuals are barely comprehensible, with illogical sequencing and imprecise expressions. Despite the attempt, common to many universities, to instill writing skills through required courses such as rhetoric or technical writing, little progress has been made in this area.
A basic problem is the common laboratory report. Over the course of their education, engineering students are estimated to spend nearly a thousand hours working on lab reports, the primary purpose of which is to teach engineers how to communicate effectively in written form. However, over the past thirty years the background of the teaching assistants who ordinarily grade lab reports has changed significantly. The vast majority of teaching assistants in the
School of Engineering and Computer Science are now nonnative speakers of English.[2] These hard-working, often brilliant young men and women have trained in scientific and mathematical disciplines for many years in their native country to achieve the high grades in their specialty that would allow them to travel abroad to complete their education.
The study of English has been a secondary or tertiary consideration. The consequence is that in the United States today the most common form of writing that engineering students do–the ubiquitous lab report–is often graded by individuals who have, at best, a fourth-grade command of English grammar and construction. In fact, the English composition in lab reports is often not graded at all.
Oakland’s proposed remedy for this situation is the development of a program whereby teaching assistants from the Department of Electrical and Systems Engineering grade the technical content of students’ lab reports, and a teaching assistant from the Department of English grades the English grammar, style, and composition of the report. This program differs in a number of key aspects from a program developed by the University of Hartford’s Civil and Environmental
Engineering Department.[3]
Engineering and English Departments are rarely seen as compatible enterprises. Yet here at Oakland University, a strong, supportive relationship is developing between the two.
This relationship has recently begun to earn national recognition. [1] The motivating factor behind the collaboration between the two departments is that one of the most common complaints from industry about graduating engineers is their
Classroom Interaction
Oakland’s collaborative engineering/English program was devised in conjunction with the sophomore-level introductory electrical circuits course which is a requirement for all
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-18

Session 13b5 engineering students in this university’s School of Engineering and Computer Science. This makes the writing style more comparable to what will actually be expected of them in the workplace. The approximately 80 students per semester in the class are divided into four different laboratory sections: each student attends one laboratory session (approximately three hours) per week for ten weeks. Two teaching assistants
(T.A.s) from the Department of Electrical and Systems
Engineering divide the load so as to teach and provide technical guidance for two sections each per week. One T.A.
from the English Department teaches relevant aspects of technical writing for the first twenty minutes of each of the four weekly labs.
During the twenty minutes of writing instruction, the sequence of lecture topics was initially structured in rather generic fashion to progress from global writing issues, such as organization, to local issues, such as punctuation. However, as experience has grown in understanding what genuinely helps engineering students improve their writing, the lectures have been increasingly supplemented by pulling examples for discussion from the students’ own work, rather than presenting issues abstractly. Looking at their own work or at the work of a classmate who faced the same writing problems , students are better able to analyze the problems and present solutions.
Students also have more motivation to improve, because the insights and skills they are developing are to be re-applied to the next laboratory report. The knowledge that engineering students are motivated to gain, then, seems to be of immediately practical value . (This consequently implies that, contrary to common belief, it is easy to teach engineering students how to write well. It is just that the teaching must be accomplished in such a fashion that engineering students find learning to write well has a practical impact on their grade.)
Overall, it has been found that the twenty minutes of instruction by the English T.A. not only teaches elements of writing to the engineering students: it also emphasizes to the students that good writing is considered to be such an important part of the curriculum that precious laboratory time is devoted to the subject. This allotment of laboratory time to discussion of writing also reduces the burden on the English
T.A., who can address students in groups rather than repeating the same lesson over and over again in private, individual tutorials.
Grading and Regrading of Laboratory Reports
The English T.A. corrects the English component of each formal lab report, including organization, clarity, grammar, usage, and spelling. Specially prepared grading sheets offer a rubric by which the writing component is carefully evaluated and graded. A sample of a grading sheet is supplied in the appendix at the end of this paper. After the return of the corrected reports, all students falling below a grade of 9.5 (out of 10.0) must revise the report, following all suggestions for improved organization and clarity, and then re-edit, correcting all errors. Both the original and the revised reports are turned over to the English T.A. for review. This rewriting is key–it has been found that if students are not forced to rewrite and correct all mistakes, they often will not even bother to read the
English T.A.’s original corrections. The possibility of having to re-write also motivates students to participate in the discussion of writing in the labs and motivates them to try to get the writing right the first time.
Structuring of the Reporting and Grading Processes
Working and reporting in pairs, the students perform nine different laboratories during the course of the semester. These experiments are thoroughly detailed in a 100 page laboratory manual written by two professors in the Department of
Electrical and Systems Engineering. This manual explains not only the specifics and background relevant to each experiment, but also, in a substantial introductory section, clearly explains what is expected in a formal written report.
All data taken in the laboratory must be written up in a lab notebook: details on how to properly keep a lab notebook are also presented in the lab manual.
It is substantially more time consuming to properly correct the English on a laboratory report than to correct the technical component of a lab report. Therefore, only five reports during the course of the semester are designated as
“formal reports” to be typewritten or printed and turned in for full evaluation by both technical and English TAs. This also reduces students’ tendencies to feel that the course overemphasizes writing as opposed to technical work.
All formal reports are expeditiously graded so as to be returned to students before they begin working on the next formal report. (The importance of grading and returning the lab reports quickly is emphasized in a strategy meeting between T.A.s and professors at the beginning of the semester.) Laboratories requiring formal reports are alternated with laboratories requiring less formal “lab notebook” reporting, so that students turn in a formal report only every second or third week. “Lab notebook” reporting consists simply of turning in the lab notebook at the end of the laboratory period for grading by the technical TA only. (Students generally tend to think of these “lab notebook” weeks as “easy weeks,” although the technical content of the lab is no less demanding. Lab notebooks themselves are graded by rather stringent formal rules, including page numbering, initialing, notations apropos equipment serial numbers, and so on.)
Page Restrictions
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-19

Session 13b5
Perhaps one of the most important keys to the success of this endeavor is that each formal report is restricted to only five pages (exclusive of appendices). It has been found that this restriction improves writing and grading in a number of ways, including the following: will be conducted with quizzes based upon the technical writing textbook.
1. Students are forced to restrict their attention to what they truly believe is important. This makes it far easier to see whether the students really understand the main point of the experiments. It also forces students to synthesize the results of their work.
2. Students develop the habit of writing concisely, rather than writing to fill pages. This makes the writing style more comparable to what will actually be expected of them in the workplace.
3. Grading is easier for both the English and the technical
T.A.s because the graders are not overwhelmed with a smokescreen of verbiage. (A series of poorly written twentypage lab reports can quickly burn out even the most wellintentioned English T.A.)
English T.A.’s “Clout”
The program has been very positively received by both students and professors alike. Surprisingly, fewer negative comments have been received under the new collaborative program than in the past about excessive time is spent by students in writing up the reports. This is probably because the five page limit considerably reduces the amount of reporting expected. Also, few comments have been received about writing skills being extraneous to the engineering curriculum–probably because real care is taken in this collaborative program to emphasize that good writing/reporting skills will play a major role in salary and promotion considerations in the workplace.
Substantial improvement has been noted in students’ writing abilities as the semester progresses. For the first lab report at the beginning of Winter semester, for example, 68%
(55 students) earned a grade of less than 9.5, which required them to rewrite their reports. (We anticipated much grumbling over this, but there was surprisingly very little.) By the semester’s end, only one student was required to rewrite the report. Efforts are currently underway to develop an assessment tool to subjectively analyze students’ technical writing skills and the improvement made over the course of a semester.
In the first semester of this program, the English T.A.
presented material in class, corrected lab reports, and worked with students in tutorials, but did not assign a grade to the lab reports. Students often expressed appreciation for the assistance of the English T.A., recognizing the potential importance of their writing skills, but this recognition was not universal.
Beginning with the second semester of this program, the
English T.A. was given a substantial amount of “clout” in the classroom. Rather than having the English and technical
T.A.s provide separate grades, the English T.A. provides a simple multiplier, between 0.5 and 1.0, which is applied to the technical T.A.’s grade. Theoretically then, the English T.A.
can take half off the final grade for a poorly done laboratory report. The first set of lab reports returned to the students often contains multipliers as low as 0.6 or 0.7–from then on, students appear to realize the threat that poor writing imposes on their grades, and interest in the matter increases accordingly. Surprisingly then, the more influence the English T.A.
has on lab report grades, the fewer complaints are received from students about wasting time on nontechnical issues.
Special thanks to Professor Gilbert Wedekind for his inspiration and example in the development of the grading sheet illustrated in the appendix.
[1] One of us (Oakley) earned the NSF FIE ‘98 New Faculty
Fellow Award for an essay (published in the CD ROM version of the 1998 Proceedings of the Frontiers in Education Conference, Tempe, Arizona) which described some of the preliminary work behind this paper.
[2] D. Bailey, “Foreign teaching assistants at U.S. universities: Problems in interaction and communication.” TESOL
Quarterly , 1983: 17, 308-310.
Textbook
[3] Peter T. Weiss and Lisa Scarola, “Using an English Tutor in the Engineering Classroom,” Journal of Engineering
Education , October, 1998: 451-453.
A textbook [4] on technical writing is also a requirement for the course; however, it has been found that most students do not purchase or refer to this text. In the future, experiments
[4] David Beer and David McMurrey, Writing as an Engineer ,
Wiley, New York, 1996.
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-20

Session 13b5
(This section to be completed by students prior to handing in report):
Lab Group Number: Date:
Lab Partner, Section #1:
(Print name)
Lab Partner, Section #2:
(Print name)
(These sections to be completed by TA)
SECTION #1
TITLE PAGE, INTRODUCTION & THEORY (5.0):
RESULTS :
#1: Completion of the tables as noted in the procedures and ancillary annotations apropos lamp brightness (1.5)
#2: Graph of resistor and lamp voltage vs current characteristic curves (1.5)
#3: Measured value of resistance of 1 inch of pencil lead drawn on paper. (0.5)
#4: Measurement error calculations.(0.5)
#5: Give complete reference (including company name, address and part number) for three different sources of blue LEDs (light emitting diodes) (1.0) (Note–this section is to be completed outside the laboratory):
SECTION #1 GRAMMAR, ORGANIZATION AND NEATNESS FACTOR (n) :
SUBTRACT 1.0 point if total length of report exceeds 5 pages (excluding title page & appendice(s))
SUBTRACT 1.0 point if your lab partner complained to an instructor that you did not turn your section in to him or her in a timely fashion.
SECTION #1 GRADE = (n × N - SUBTRACT)
SECTION #2
DISCUSSION : In the course of a reasonable and readable discussion of the results of the lab, answers to all questions posed in the procedures text must be included. (8.0):
CONCLUSIONS & APPENDICES (including sample calculations as necessary) (2.0)
SECTION #2 GRAMMAR, ORGANIZATION AND NEATNESS FACTOR (n ):
SUBTRACT 1.0 point if total length of report exceeds 5 pages (excluding title page & appendice(s))
SECTION #2 GRADE = (n × N - SUBTRACT)
0-7803-5643-8/99/$10.00 © 1999 IEEE November 10 - 13, 1999 San Juan, Puerto Rico
29 th ASEE/IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference
13b5-21