DEVELOPMENT OF A WRITING WORKSHOP FOR A MECHANICAL ENGINEERING LABORATORY COURSE

摘要

Engineering students typically encounter formal engineering report writing in their laboratory courses. These courses normally occur in the curriculum well after the required English composition courses. Besides the increased demands of being able to write an engineering report, many students at this point are rusty in the grammar department. To help overcome these difficulties a two week technical writing component (writing workshop) was added to the junior level mechanical engineering experimentation course in spring 2010. In this paper the writing workshop is presented in detail. Quizzes and the final paper submitted by the students were used for assessment of the students' writing.