Teaching Engineering Writing through Rhetorical Genre Studies

Abstract

Contemporary understandings of genre create new ways to approach how we teach writing. Recent developments in rhetorical genre studies reveal a transfer-minded curriculum for teaching writing that can be applied to a variety of disciplines. This paper describes a curriculum design for undergraduate engineering students that explains genre as organizational principle used to guide responses to varied rhetorical situations, as research method used to illuminate patterns in global (organization and formal and local (syntax and sentence-level)writing conventions, and as workplace introduction used to highlight skills to accomplish daily tasks and conform to workplace cultures. It then details how students responded to each unit, displaying their methods and findings, demonstrating an increased awareness of discipline-specific writing conventions and preparation for transitioning to the workplace. Writing and engineering faculty can benefit from such a curriculum as it both identifies common writing conventions and scaffolds how we prepare students for writing tasks beyond our courses.