Work in progress - unified technical writing guidelines for engineering courses

Teaching of technical writing in an engineering program is usually a difficult task because of the wide range of technical subjects in the engineering field and the inherently different writing styles adopted by the various engineering disciplines. This is compounded by the different background of engineering faculty, the dichotomy of the background of students in a typical engineering class, and different author requirements by different technical journals. These, sometimes mutually exclusive issues, tend to impede student's learning of technical writing. In the course of their training at Grand Valley State University (GVSU), beginning with the freshman semester and continuing until the senior year, engineering students are required to complete numerous writing assignments. These assignments are usually in a variety of different engineering courses with different topical emphasis. To help engineering students master the fundamental aspects of technical writing, the faculty in the School of Engineering at GVSU have developed unified technical writing guidelines for engineering students. In this paper we discuss some of the features of the unified guidelines and preliminary results obtained from using these guidelines in some of the sophomore level courses.