ABSTRACT

In an attempt to improve the written communication skills of engineering students, a technical writing expert was engaged as a writing tutor. The tutorworked solelywith the students in a required, four-credit undergraduate water resources course. The tutor critiqued the students' grammar in laboratory reports and cover letters that were required as apart ofproject submittals. After makingwritten comments on paper, the writing expert met with individual students to discuss writing improvements in detail. The engineering professor also commented on grammar, but it was the tutor who was responsible for ten percent ofthe grade on laboratory reports and projects. The results of the process, including a student survey, are discussed.

I. INTRoDUCTION

As prospective employers demand better written communication skills from engineers and as engineering educators revise their curriculum to meet these demands, many techniques have be developed in an effort to enhance the writing skills of graduates. There are arguments both for and against a separate writing course for engineering students as discussed in reference 1. As seen in reference 2, some departments have developed writing courses that must be taken concurrently with engineering courses, while still others require informal journals to be written by the students throughout the semester as in reference 3. Finally, in reference 4, others imply that the enhancement of writing skills should be strictly the responsibility of the engineering professors. While all these methods certainly have been used to enhance writing skills, this paper describes another technique which has been employed by the University of Hartford's Civil and Environmental Engineering department. This method involves the part time employment of a writing tutor. The writing tutor, who has an advanced degree in English, was employed with the sole intent of improving the writing skills of undergraduate engineering students.

II. Focus OF PLAN

A tutor, who had earned Master's and Bachelor's degrees in English, was employed by the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering in an attempt to increase the writing skills of engineering students. The goal was not to bring every student up to some predetermined level of writing effectiveness, but simply to increase the writing skill of each student the maximum amount within the time period of the semester. The hiring of a specialized tutor, rather than having the engineering professor be responsible for all grading of writing, allowed for more individualized time with each student. Rather than simply making comments in the papers column, the tutor met individually with each student to discuss his or her writing in detail.

Although a writing tutor has been used by the department in the past, the course discussed herein is the first course in which an assessment of the effectiveness of such a plan has been performed. The course was a junior level water resources class that could possibly be described more accurately as "Applied Hydraulics." Writing requirements of the class included six technical laboratory reports and six projects, which were essentially extended homework problems. For each project, the students received a cover letter from an imaginary consulting firm or township asking for their expert opinion on a given scenario. Pertinent data were included as enclosures. In response, the students were required to solve the problem and provide their calculations and write-up, including their own cover letter which was unique to each project (this format was borrowed from Dr. John Gulliver, Department of Civil Engineering, University of Minnesota).

With regards to the projects, the tutor graded the cover letter for grammatical content and for accessibility to a non-engineering client. The cover letter was worth ten percent of the overall project grade. The tutor's evaluation was based on grammar and basic editing but also on whether the information in the cover letter could be understood by someone without an engineering background. Within the letter, there had to be both a summary of the technical data and results, and a brief overview of the project. The engineering professor also commented on the cover letter when necessary and graded the rest of the project for technical and grammatical content. When grading the laboratory reports, the tutor graded the entire report for grammar and editing, and for paragraph and argument development. The tutor was not concerned with how the experiment was performed but rather with how it was described. In this evaluation, five questions were considered by the tutor:

Was the entire report written clearly and concisely in one tense?

Were the experiment, results, and sources of errors described fully and logically so that they could be followed by others?

Were all references to outside works adequately cited?

Had the report been proofread? (e.g., Were there any spelling errors or missing or inappropriate punctuation? Were there any fragmented or run-on sentences?)

Was the report polished? (e.g., Did the page numbers listed in the Table of Contents correspond to the actual pages? Was it written in formal English without contractions or double negatives?)

Again, this evaluation was worth ten percent of the lab report grade. While grading the report for technical content, the professor also commented on grammar but was not involved in the portion of the grade attributed to the grammar.

After the first lab report was reviewed by the tutor, individual meetings were scheduled at least once every other week with the students. The purpose of the first meeting was to review the student's first report and also for the student and tutor to become familiar with each other. The initial student reaction to the process ranged from anxious and apprehensive to completely confident that the individual's writing was *fine" and needed no improvement. In all of these scenarios, the tutor emphasized that clear communication was more important than a flashy style and that proofreading and revision were at least as important as the initial writing process.

As the semester progressed, some student papers required little or no comment with regards to writing. In these instances, the writing expert suspended the individual appointments with these students. Since some students were not always required to meet with the writing expert, it was not possible to have the meetings contribute directly to the class grade. However, items discussed during the meetings could significantly improve grades for the next assignment. Perhaps this is why there was never a problem of students missing scheduled meetings.

As the individual appointments waned, the tutor began to hold brief sessions of grammar review at the beginning of each lab period. During these sessions, the tutor provided general overviews of grammar or editing issues which affected the majority of the group. Some topics included: format of lists; commas and punctuation; subject-verb agreement; and tense consistency. During these brief sessions, the students could ask any grammar questions they had or discuss other tutor comments.

As mentioned previously, this was not the first time an English tutor was employed by the department to critique lab reports. This had been done for two previous semesters for a soils laboratory and a concrete laboratory. However, this was the first time students were required to write cover letters and was the first time that grammar was worth a portion of assignment grades.

III. RESULTS

While somewhat difficult to measure quantitatively, marked improvements in writing skills were observed in many individuals, especially those who struggled early in the semester. For example, at the beginning of the semester, many cover letters had several comments and/or corrections with corresponding point deductions. At the end of the semester, most cover letters were nearly perfect. There was also noticeable improvement in laboratory reports. Three significant areas of error early in the semester, and three of the biggest areas of improvement, were the use and location of commas, the use of a consistent tense, and using lists (e.g., with bullets or numbers) to display several related ideas or results. The same English tutor was employed in the previous semesters, and the same professor taught the soils lab. Both concurred that improvement (if any) was not as noticeable when, in the previous courses, grammar did not account for ten percent of the assignment grade. Further, by the grammar remarks being part of the whole grade, there was a shift in the students' perceptions whereby the writing of the report became part of the process and not just ancillary to the lab experiment, data, calculations, and results.