Using rhetorical analysis to help undergraduates acquire effective professional writing skills

Rhetorical analysis, a strategy for examining relationships among a writer's purpose, the audience's needs, and the structure of a text, is an effective tool for teaching undergraduates to communicate effectively as engineers. This paper describes a series of writing and research assignments based on rhetorical analysis, which have been used successfully in a mechanical engineering class to guide students in conducting a meaningful literature search and communicating their findings to several audiences. The overall assignment, developed collaboratively by mechanical engineering faculty and writing professionals in the College of Engineering's Professional Communications Center, engages students in deep examination of texts to help them discover principles of professional communications and the genres most common in mechanical engineering. Several steps are involved. Students receive instruction in rhetorical and genre analysis, then use a handout to analyze an article from an ASME journal. Next, students present the highlights of the professional articles to a group of peers and answer their questions. Students then write and submit an abstract to receive approval of a topic before making a third, and final oral presentation. This series of assignments requires students to analyze their own and others' communications rhetorically, exploring decisions writers make in presenting materials to distant and immediate audiences. The assignments also require students to examine their own reading processes as a means of understanding the relationships among the reader, the text, and the writer. The paper describes the assignments and the quality of student's presentations and abstracts. It also provides suggestions for using theories of rhetorical analysis and pedagogy, and genre analysis in teaching undergraduates the subtleties of engineering genres.