Incorporating writing skills into the engineering curriculum

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.