Education in STEM program, aims to integrate the teaching of writing skills into undergraduate civil engineering courses. For decades employers have encouraged engineering programs to pay more attention to the development of workplace writing skills.1,2 Previously, however, no largescale studies had sought to analyze the writing of engineering practitioners or identify practitioners' specific concerns about student writing. No teaching materials addressed writing skills from the perspective of civil engineering workplace practice.Believing that teaching innovations are most likely to be effective if they are based on sound empirical evidence, we first investigated how student writing differs from successful practitioners' writing. We analyzed over 400 documents from 70 firms and agencies and 400 papers from students at five universities, covering a range of sub-fields and document types. The project uses mixed-method techniques 3 that combine quantitative linguistic analysis of the writing and qualitative analysis of interviews with practitioners and students. We then develop teaching materials that target specific weaknesses. The project team includes applied linguists (who study writing in different communication contexts), engineering faculty, and engineer practitioners in the local community, so multiple perspectives are brought to the identification of student needs and the new teaching materials.Comprehensive descriptions of the project and teaching materials can be found elsewhere. 4,5,6 This paper focuses on a single thirty-minute workshop. Unlike most of the teaching materials, which focus on specific writing skills, this workshop targets student beliefs -specifically, erroneous beliefs that underlie writing weaknesses. The workshop is entitled Three Myths about Writing in Civil Engineering Practice.
Overview of Workshop Development and UseDuring interviews for the project research, many students expressed the same three mistaken beliefs about writing in civil engineering. These beliefs corresponded to some of the most ineffective characteristics of the student writing and were in direct conflict with the practices of the engineering practitioners. The beliefs were common even among graduating seniors who had taken technical writing courses and written numerous papers in their engineering courses. The three myths are the following:1. You can make your writing more professional by using long sentences and fancy words.
Writing is a matter of "impersonal style," completely separate from engineering.
Rules of English grammar and punctuation don't matter for civil engineering practice.With these ideas widespread and persistent, we decided to take a direct approach to countering them. We developed a workshop that does not take a great deal of class time but alerts students to the erroneous beliefs, illustrates their harmful effects on writing, and introduces beliefs and practices more consistent with engineering practitioners' writing. The workshop demonstrates to students that effective writing and effective...
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