Engineering Sentences: A Cross-Disciplinary Training Program

Although Cockrell School of Engineering (CSE) undergraduates take a required engineering writing class, which I teach for Chemical Engineering, they typically struggle with writing laboratory and long-form research reports. Helping CSE students to overcome this obstacle matters because writing technical reports prepares engineering students for the writing-intensive work of a professional engineer. Faculty teaching these classes would also benefit from higher quality student work. Meanwhile, UT’s University Writing Center (UWC) offers one-on-one consultations, and group workshops to 40,804 undergraduate and 11,028 graduate students. However, most UWC Consultants are students from Humanities disciplines, and they have little prior experience with science and engineering writing genres. Consequently, they have felt under-prepared to assist CSE students with technical reports, and relatively few CSE students seek their help. Teaching technical writing to these consultants will support both their current work and future job prospects. The UWC is also trying to encourage CSE undergraduates to train and work as Consultants. So far, only a few have done so, or signed up to do so. Underlying the problem is an old cultural divide between STEM and Humanities/Social Science disciplines. For the Humanities-trained Consultants, I hypothesize that the training and experience will expand their knowledge of writing genres and scope of expertise. My experience working with Engineering Undergraduates has shown me that they enjoy expanding their range of expertise, particularly when they can contribute to a new enterprise. So, I expect that encouraging Engineering undergraduates to work with the UWC will begin to break down this cultural divide. For other CSE students, I expect that early, positive experiences working with the Consultants will encourage them to seek UWC assistance more often and improve their writing.

Explore the resources available at the University Writing Center for additional support and tools to enhance writing skills:
UWC Resources

Learn about the Consultant Certification program, which offers training to UWC Consultants to improve their ability to assist students, particularly in technical writing:
Consultant Certification Information