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Thinking back to my own engineering education, I recall that most
of my classmates tended to shine on anything that remotely smacked
of "Humanities," because they assumed the content would be useless
to them as engineers and the classes would drag down their GPAs
anyway. They just concentrated on pumping up their grades in their
technical subjects to compensate. (I was the oddity, the engineering
student who used "Humanities" classes to pump my GPA *up,* was
there ever a better early warning signal as to where I was going to
end up?)
I would start by teaching your students something they can use now
*as* students, for example, how to produce the documentation they
have to turn in for their various classes (and not just the technical
ones). Talk about "knowing your audience" (in this case, college
professors marking their papers), and presenting information to
that audience to achieve their desired goals (higher grades, this
term). Once you have their interest, then you can proceed to the
nuts and bolts.
Gene Kim-Eng
----- Original Message -----
From: "Evelyn G Barker" <ebarker -at- uta -dot- edu>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Sent: Tuesday, March 23, 2004 7:49 PM
Subject: teaching technical writing to engineers
>
> Hello,
> I'm going to be teaching a technical writing class to junior-level
> university engineering students and wondered what the group thought it was
> important for them to learn.
---
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