Center for Technical Communication

Mike Keller

Your mind aches. The blank computer screen has yet to fill itself with a brilliant lab report, a dazzling technical presentation, or fascinating statics paper. Short on research are you not. Your comprehensive investigations have spawned a tower of note cards stretching to the heavens, yet your essay stubbornly refuses to leave the ground. Data tables and charts pervade the pages of your laboratory notebook, each equation yearning to proclaim itself to all. Yet, they remain dismally muted in the confines of the binder.

As the clock ticks, you speculate on the justification for a writing assignment. Hey, we're engineers! We do calculus, not papers! Nothing could be further from the truth. Engineers, as much as the professionals in any other field, depend upon communication to express their work. No one refutes the level of technical competence required of engineers, but many underestimate the indisputable importance of writing and speaking to the practice of engineering.

Engineers interpret and harness the laws of nature, the intricacies of mathematics, and the sheer ingenuity that defines humankind. They perform these functions not as confined lab rats, toiling away in some distant and sterile laboratory, but as integral members of dynamic teams. Those with whom engineers work simply lack engineering technical expertise. As such, engineers have been handed the unique responsibility of communicating their expertise and ability with the rest of the world. The engineer must understand how to inform and achieve consensus among others. They must gain an intimate understanding of the methods of proposing and persuading others of their ideas and initiatives. As the world unites people and cultures, engineers must adapt and refine methods of fusing together engineering and communication.

Engineering communication introduces a challenging new way of thinking for most new students. All too often, high school courses adhere to rigid grammatical rules and force students to manufacture dry essays that merely feign an interest in their subject matter. Engineers employ communication skills to achieve concrete goals. This result-oriented approach towards communications forms a formidable part of an engineer's arsenal. While the electrical engineer, for example, may use differential equations to describe a particular circuit, he will leverage his adept communication ability to propose a request for funding so that his idea may be transformed into reality. Communication, not for its own sake, but for the results it offers, performs an indelible function in modern engineering.

Crucial as it is, few students learn the intricacies of communication with ease. With this keenly in mind, the College of Engineering began the creation of a solution. This semester, the College unveiled its newest feature to all engineering students: the Center for Technical Communication (CTC).

The Center began with the hiring of a full time Director last spring to develop and coordinate the construction of a student oriented writing center. The Center opened its doors this fall in the Commons area next to the Engineering Library. The College of Engineering designed the CTC to specifically meet the unique writing needs of engineering students here at Iowa. With those needs in mind, Scott Coffel, the Center's Director, initiated three components for the CTC.

The first segment of the CTC, editorial consultants, is comprised of a small team of local writing professionals with an understanding of engineering. These consultants provide focused feedback on the students' writing assignments.

A second project of the Center-still under construction-is the Essentials of Communications course offering. This class will commence in the Spring 2002 semester and will offer students a strong set of fundamentals with which to apply to a variety of relevant engineering writing activities.

The third pillar of the CTC offers a tremendous opportunity for all engineering students. The Center has composed a collection of nine peer tutors to form the Peer Tutoring Project. The CTC designed this endeavor from the ground up with the needs of the students as its primary objective. As such, the tutors helping in the Center all understand the concerns and needs of the students. Each tutor is a current undergraduate engineering student and has been through the same courses and engaged in the same writing projects as the students that they help. The tutors understand what it's like to design a lab report or compose a Statics paper.

Signing up for the free service is easy. Students may schedule a meeting with any available tutor from a time sheet located inside of the Center. When a student arrives for a session, the student and tutor often read through the paper together. This enables the tutor to get a better sense of the writing project's objectives and observe how the student has approached those objectives. Then, the two can begin to collaborate on ways to enhance the overall quality of the project. The tutor won't tell the student what to write nor will he lecture on comma errors or criticize about obscure APA rules.

Instead, the student and tutor direct their energies towards the higher issues of writing. They focus on ways to create a seamless and coherent written presentation. Together, they seek methods of focusing the paper on the needs of the intended audience. The two consider techniques that enhance the paper's ability to communicate the ideas of the student.

By focusing on these global issues rather than obsessing over simple editorial concerns, the students gain a dramatic understanding of the process that defines writing. Most importantly, the tutors guide the student towards habits that he or she may leverage in the future to make better use of communication as a tool. Again, the Center strives to show students practical ways of integrating communication into engineering.

Clearly, a single session cannot create an exquisite writer, nor does the Center attempt it to do so. The CTC deliberately avoids burying the student under a flurry of ideological rules and procedures and instead takes a far more laid back approach. The College realizes the busy schedule that most engineers have and has designed the Center to accommodate those needs. The Center offers numerous sessions, each lasting about thirty minutes. The tutors will use every session to introduce and accentuate another aspect of writing for the student. Each meeting yields a practical example of how these concepts may be applied to real life writing situations for the engineer. The student then has the opportunity to modify the work to reflect these new skills at his or her convenience. A week or so later, the student might return for another discussion and continue the process. What was impossible to accomplish in thirty minutes becomes very attainable over the course of four years.

The CTC continually searches for new ways to expand its offerings to engineering students. One current endeavor of the Center is the construction of an "OWL," an Online Writing Laboratory. Once completed, dedicated computer systems will allow tutors to interact online with engineering students about writing questions. Students will gain access to the peer tutors from any Internet connection through instant messaging and email. The student will be able to upload their documents so the tutors can interactively collaborate with the students. This offers a great way for students with quick questions to correspond with trained tutors. It also allows students that are unable to schedule a regular appointment to speak with the peer tutors. This project exemplifies ways in which the Center actively pursues the integration of writing into the engineering curriculum.

Engineers transform the imagined into reality. Communication offers engineers a fundamental means by which to achieve those ends. By mastering communication, an engineer becomes far more able to pursue and accomplish any engineering project. So rather than cringe at the onset of the next writing assignment and recoil from memories of bad past encounters, consider what can be gained by the experience. Take advantage of the Center and the peer tutors. Use the opportunity to learn a little more about the process of writing in engineering. With a little help, learning the process of writing can become an extremely rewarding part of the engineering curriculum.