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Publishing in Scientific and Engineering Contexts1
Over the past several years, faculty participants in Writing Across the
Curriculum (WAC) workshops at Colorado School of Mines (CSM) have been
asked what they know about writing that they did not know when they completed
their doctoral degrees. When their responses are compiled, faculty are asked to
mark separately those items they think undergraduates and graduates should
know before completing their respective degrees. Faculty responses indicate that
an overwhelming majority of faculty members want their students—and
particularly their graduate students—to be better prepared than they were in
terms of their written communication skills that augment chances for professional
success. Faculty members then discuss which writing abilities they think most
graduate students actually possess when they receive a graduate degree.
According to most faculty, the abilities students possess depend on several
variables, such as their writing ability when they arrive, the quality of advising, the
degree to which professors’ and advisors’ knowledge of written communication in
the discipline is tacit of explicit, and whether faculty view the process of initiating
graduate students into the ways of communicating in a specific discipline as their
active responsibility or as something that will simply be learned “along the way.”
Out of these and other exigencies, we designed and co-taught a seminar for
graduate students called Academic Publishing, intended primarily to equip
students with the knowledge and skills necessary for success in publishing in the
academic arena and, since some of the knowledge is transferable across the
rhetorical contexts, in the workplace. This paper describes the need for the
course; the course goals; our “concept application” instructional approach,
1
Jon Leydens and Barabara Olds, “Publishing in Scientific and Engineering Contexts: A Course
for Graduate Students,” IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication 50, 1 (2007): 45–
56. The passages selected are from pages 45–46.
Note that I have not strictly replaced every fifth word, creating exceptions when the fifth word is
a statistic or endnote number; however, on average I have replaced every fifth word. The
passage following the heading (“Need for the course”) is 419 words. I replaced 82 words.
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including the rhetorical tools and their application; and our assessment of the
pilot offering of the course in 2000 and subsequent offerings in 2002 and 2004.
Need for the course
When Albert Einstein completed his dissertation on molecular dimensions at
the University of Zurich in 1905, it was 21 pages long and did not cite a single
reference [1]. In the last century, much has changed: scientists and engineers
today write dissertations that are both longer and draw from a greater wealth of
existing research. The complexity inherent in writing modern theses and
dissertations was one motivator for this course.
Along with some graduate students from the applied sciences, most students
enrolled in Academic Publishing hail from engineering disciplines, a reflection of
the CSM graduate student body. Of the 38 students who have taken the course
in the first four iterations, 32 have come from engineering disciplines. Learning to
write in engineering and applied science academic contexts differs from doing
the same in workplace contexts due to different exigencies, genres, contexts,
and more. However, some general rhetorical principles apply in both contexts,
especially the need for rhetorical awareness of audiences, purposes, occasions,
writers, and topics. Hence, this course serves students whether their careers
take them to industry or academia by addressing a need for greater rhetorical
understanding of scientific and engineering writing. Writing exigencies in publishor-perish academia may be obvious, but studies on workplace communication
consistently underscore the important role writing also plays in the life of
practicing engineers. Interviews and surveys of practicing engineers have
emphasized the importance of communication and writing skills for success in
the workplace [2]-[5]. Research has also indicated a direct correlation between
the amount of technical communication instruction in college and career
advancement [6]. A review of studies on workplace writing concludes that
between 20% and 40% of a typical engineer’s workday is spent writing, a figure
that climbs as one moves up the career ladder [7]. In another study, engineers
who had been in the workforce for two to three years estimated that they spent
approximately 30% of their workday writing, while middle managers estimated
50%–70%, some as much as 95% [8]. The amount of time these professionals
may spend writing in industry or in academia represents a significant financial
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investment by their employers, who also have a stake in efficient, effective
written communication. Based on the results of one survey, a recent report
estimates that the cost of remedying writing deficiencies in employees of major
US corporations exceeds $3 billion annually [9]. Such research underscores the
need for our course and indirectly for its design, which focuses on developing
both specific disciplinary writing abilities and overall communication and
rhetorical abilities.
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