As part of a 10-week "cornerstone" design project in the second semester of Ohio State's first-year honors engineering sequence, student teams must submit a complete documentation package, including a thorough technical report. During the approximately twenty-year history of the program, teams have submitted drafts of each half of the report earlier in the term for feedback. This recursive approach is in line with recommended best practices in writing. In spite of the heavy emphasis on technical writing in the prior semester, these drafts were often disappointing and time-consuming to grade. Also, it sometimes seemed that feedback on the first half draft had little impact on the quality of the second half draft; instructors often felt that they were seeing the same problems with the second half draft that they had on the first.
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