Developing Industrial Cases For Technical Writing on Campus  

At the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, the World's Engineering Congress met and included special section, 'Division E, Engineering Education.' This division was the seed for The Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and one paper delivered in the section was 'Training of Students in Technical Literary Work,' evidencing early concern about engineers' education in technical writing. But concern alone did not solve the problem. Two decades later Edward D. Sabine, a terminal engineer, complained that most college graduated engineers could not even write a decent letter. And in the same year F. W. Springer, a professor of electrical engineering, spoke of the need for teaching 'engineering-English.' Fifty years ago Hale Sutherland, a professor of Civil Engineering, described how Case School of Applied Science had instituted a two-course, technical writing requirement to overcome 'the engineer's ancient weakness, his inability to speak and write effectively.' One approach to solving this problem has been cooperation. Seventy years ago C. W. Park wrote an article about the cooperative program at the University of Cincinnati, in which members of the Engineering and English Departments worked together to promote better writing; obviously the idea of teaming up is hardly new. Thirty years ago The Journal of Engineering Education published another description of a cooperative effort and just five years ago devoted an entire issue to technical writing. The need for teaching engineers to write and the difficulties in accomplishing the objective even cooperatively have been recognized for almost a century; we are still grappling with the problem.

Mair, David and John Radovich. JAC (1985). Articles>Education>Writing>Technical Writing