The assignment could be a status report on a graduate student’s research. Or an abstract for a technology conference. Perhaps even a proposal for funding.
“The point is to make the assignments real and useful,” says David Lougee, director of the technical communications program in the School of Engineering. “We’re not teaching essay writing, but how to write about real things.”
For more than 25 years, students in chemical, mechanical, electrical and sundry other engineering specialties have been honing their communication skills—both written and oral—in one-on-one, intensive sessions with tutors who are whizzes at making tech talk understandable. “The model instructor can read dissertations and correct equations,” Lougee says about the eight writing instructors and 20 speech tutors.
The program was launched in 1976 at the behest of engineering faculty with experience outside the academy. “Engineers have for a long time been notoriously bad communicators,” Lougee says. “And the dean kept getting advice from people in industry, saying it was important that students come out of Stanford with communication skills.”
When he took over as director of the program in 1981, Lougee began to hire lecturers and tutors who had doctorates in English and lots of teaching experience. His own work teaching freshman English and serving as a writing consultant for the Graduate School of Business and the Law School had shown him that one-on-one tutorials were the best way to teach writing. Last year alone, the program served 925 undergraduates and graduate students in 3,500 half-hour, or longer, sessions.
Lougee also teaches three writing courses, including one that he coordinates with ME 103, a mechanical engineering shop course in which students have to design and build a prototype for a product. The writing assignments begin with a cover letter, résumé and design proposal directed to a manager, and graduate to a description of the manufacturing system the student intends to use. In the final assignment, six hypothetical months down the design road, the student looks at the projected market share and makes recommendations for changes in the product.
“One of the things I try to emphasize to engineering students is that writing is a kind of problem-solving design process,” Lougee says. “I try to show them that writing in my course is designed to help them think about what they’re doing in the design class.”
