Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

Abstract

Graduate engineering students must produce a wide variety of high-quality and discipline-specific work throughout their post-baccalaureate study. They are expected to have expertise in writing journal and conference papers, dissertations, and qualifying proposals, while learning to communicate in accordance with the norms and expectations of their specific disciplines. However, few students have such expertise at the start of their graduate program, nor do they formally acquire it as part of their coursework. Direct writing instruction in engineering graduate programs is scarce, and to the extent that curricular or co-curricular technical communication instruction is offered, it is often deemed remedial or separate from disciplinary content knowledge. As a consequence, writing is largely devalued, despite its outsized role in graduate students' academic lives and careers in industry and academia.To address this gap, the Council of Graduate Schools recommends the establishment of graduate writing centers (GWCs) that are staffed by trained writing consultants for one-on-one tutoring and offer various professional career and mentoring workshops, retreats, and student-led writing groups. Research suggests that GWCs can help students cultivate professional skills and can provide emotional support in an environment that can often be isolating. Such services offered by GWCs have been shown to supplement writing coursework in shortening the duration of doctoral degree completion and attrition rates in Ph.D. programs.As over half of engineering graduate students are from outside the U.S., GWCs that serve this group must also offer support for students developing academic literacy in English. This sometimes involves embracing approaches traditionally disavowed by many writing centers, such as providing grammar instruction and other sentence-level support. The availability of such support, which is actively sought out by multilingual graduate student writers, diminishes the discourse deficit around their writing abilities with a more positive and inclusive stance.Currently, the University of Southern California (USC), offers a writing center operated by the university that provides writing assistance for all students, faculty and staff. To provide additional and specialized support for USC's 1,000 engineering Ph.D. students, the authors, who are faculty at the Engineering in Society Program at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (Viterbi), launched the Communications Hub (Hub) in August 2022 with a one-year financial commitment from Viterbi. This unique academic support is based on the premise that graduate students carry out advanced disciplinary research and have extensive writing needs with a high level of rhetorical complexity that 1 are distinct from those of undergraduate writing. Students may be defining original research questions and making claims that involve a level of knowledge transformation that exceeds the standard approaches of traditional university writing centers.The Hub offers one-on-one writing and sp...