Paper ID #33208

Academic Writing at the Doctoral and Professional Level in Engineering:The Current State of the Field and Pathways Forward

Ms. Kate Caroline Batson, University of Georgia

KateBatsonis a PhD candidate within Language and Literacy Education at the University of Georgia. Herresearch is centered around writing practices at the doctoral and professional levels within engineering.Previously, she served as an instructor in the Intensive English Program (IEP) at The University of Missis-sippi, where she taught 18 different courses and served as the IEP Operations Coordinator. She was alsothe IEP in-house specialist on academic writing at the graduate level and worked collaboratively with theCollege of Engineering and Graduate Writing Center to ensure an array of writing services were offeredto international graduate students within the College of Engineering and other departments. She has pre-sented at regional and national Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) conferences.She holds a BA in Latin American Studies and an MA in Spanish Linguistics from The University ofAlabama, and an MA in Modern Languages (TESL) from The University of Mississippi.

c©American Society for Engineering Education, 2021

Academic Writing at the Doctoral and Professional Level in Engineering: The Current State of the Field and Pathways Forward

Kate C. Batson

The University of Georgia

Introduction

Clear, concise communication has long been considered to be a skill central to the engineering industry around the globe. Besides its ubiquity in practice within industry, communication in engineering settings can profoundly affect the development and safety of technology. As an example, breakdown in engineering communication has the ability to lead to engineering disasters, as demonstrated by the example of the space shuttle Challenger explosion. Thus, effective communication in engineering—including written communication—is of paramount importance. The importance of communication within the engineering industry has prompted an ideological shift in higher education—especially regarding the skills engineering students should possess. Learning outcomes of engineering students are moving from emphasis on students’ technical abilities towards what are termed ‘soft skills’ that complement technical expertise—one such skill being successful communication. In fact, the main accrediting board for the Engineering field—the Accreditation Board for Engineering and Technology (ABET)—listed the students’ “ability to communicate effectively with a range of audiences” (ABET, 2017) as one of its main criteria for institutions seeking accreditation. Troy and Liang (2019) echo this concern, arguing that graduate student1 ability to “communicate well both in written and oral forms is essential for a successful career” (p. 1) and the ability to write “will profoundly shape both initial and long term post-PhD career opportunities” (Maher et al., 2013, p. 707). Moreover, in the United States, research suggests that engineers spend more than 30% of their time writing (Covington et al., 2007; Kreth, 2000). In a survey of U.K. engineers, more than 50% of the respondents spent more than 40% of their time writing (Sales, 2006). This important shift of emphasis towards improving the written proficiency of engineering students has led to an increasing amount of research that has investigated how to support students in successfully engaging in the written genres common in both academia and industry. Yet, much of the efforts of both researchers and practitioners on how to support student writing have been centered around those at the undergraduate level, with very few studies focusing on how engineering programs may support writing skills within doctoral education (Berdanier, 2019; Cox, 2011; Gassman et al., 2013). This finding suggests a movement of engineering departments—and higher education institutions in general—to expect students to be fully apprenticed into academic and professional writing of their field upon beginning their doctoral studies, even though the written genres that these students encounter in doctoral programs may differ greatly from those required in earlier degrees.

1 ‘Engineering students.’ “graduate students,” and ‘students’, as it used here and thereafter, refers specifically to students at the doctoral level, if not specifically noted.

Available scholarship on academic and professional writing within engineering thus provides limited insight to truly understand and address the present nature of doctoral writing support. The few studies that have examined writing at the doctoral level suggest that engineering students enter doctoral programs with varying degrees of ability to express themselves through written communication (e.g., Collwell et al., 2013). Research also shows that both doctoral students and graduate faculty in engineering alike do recognize the importance of written skills as essential to student success (Cox, 2011; Lala et al., 2018). There is little consensus, however, on whose responsibility it is to support the written skills of doctoral students, which faculty are best ‘fit’ to support the writing skills of doctoral students, along with which instructional practices best support students as they enter into the world of academic and professional writing. As such, it is vital to explore how engineering disciplines—and the field as whole—have approached the teaching of writing at the doctoral and professional level; and, to consider what this means for doctoral students, especially those who are multilingual learners2, that come with distinct ways of meaning making that must be integrated with the established conventions of their field. In the sections below, I review the present nature of how engineering has approached the teaching of academic and professional writing with several foci: who holds the responsibility to teach academic and professional writing to doctoral students in engineering; the common types of support that doctoral students in engineering receive and the strengths and challenges with that support; and the implications of these practices for multilingual learners within engineering. Who is Responsible for Writing Support at the Doctoral Level in Engineering? A perennial issue in doctoral writing support in engineering is who holds the responsibility to teach students about conventionalized and expected practices of academic and professional writing within their respective disciplinary communities. A search through the literature reveals that the answer to this question is often debated and largely depends on institutional and departmental factors such as writing services available, collaborative efforts among university departments, faculty time and expertise in writing, and ideologies regarding membership in a disciplinary community and who is fit to teach writing to doctoral-level engineers. Technical Communication Programs Technical communication programs have traditionally been assigned responsibility for developing the communication skills of engineering students for three reasons (Wolfe, 2009): technical communication faculty understand writing pedagogy, they possess expertise in the field of technical communication, and engineers were either disinclined or unable to teach it. Technical communication indeed broke ground in the area of engineering written communication decades ago with Seltzer’s (1983) study on the composing processes of one engineer at work (Ford & Riley, 2003). Prior to Seltzer’s study, however, the technical communication field actually knew very little about the written communication practices of engineers. Technical communication experts knew “what scientists and engineers [wrote] at work” (p. 325) but they did not research how engineers went about planning, drafting, and revising texts. Since the work

2 It is recognized how problematic labels can be for describing language use and experience. In this paper, the term multilingual is being used to refer to doctoral students who consider their home language to be a language other than English.

of Seltzer, there has indeed been increased emphasis from technical communication researchers on writing within engineering contexts, including communication within engineering curricula and transfer of engineering written skills from the classroom to industry (Katz, 1993; Paradis et al., 1985; Winsor, 1989). However, a debate remains over whether or not technical communication faculty truly possess enough familiarity with the conventions and models appropriate to communication within the engineering profession; in other words, they do not know what it means to write like an engineer, because they aren’t part of that disciplinary community (Winsor, 1996). For instance, Wolfe (2009) finds issue in technical communication faculty teaching writing to engineers, citing “teachers who are unaffiliated with the engineering department and have little or no experience in this discipline” (p. 352). Furthermore, an argument is made that the writing done in technical communication programs “bears little in common with either workplace engineering writing or writing in university engineering courses” (p. 352). In fact, in her analysis of twelve technical communication textbooks and their treatment and discussions of the types of writing that engineers produced, Wolfe found a “persistent-bias toward humanities-based styles and genres and a failure to address the forms of argument and evidence that our science and engineering students most need to succeed as rhetoricians in their fields” (p. 351). Similarly, at the conclusion of her review of technical communication textbooks, Miller (1992) made a puzzling claim that “there are no distinctive features of technical writing that set it clearly apart as a species from business writing” (p. 117). Indeed, while pure technical writing may hold similarities with business writing, these findings reveal an issue if doctoral and professional writing in a scientific discipline such as engineering is considered. Across disciplines, including those of engineering, there are specific stylistic preferences, documentation conventions, and genres that curricular materials in technical writing courses do not account for. As Collwell et al. (2011, para. 3) concisely argue:

technical writing is usually not the same as scholarly writing, and scholarly writing is required in most research-based writing projects, such as theses and directed projects. As opposed to being concise, to the point, or having the data speak for themselves, scholarly writing relies on analysis, synthesis, and logical construction of a proposition with appropriate support. Technical writing is generally designed primarily to transmit specific information, while scholarly writing is designed to underpin the creation of new knowledge.

Thus, the way in which technical communication programs approach teaching writing—along with debates on whether or not technical writing instructors can be considered members of an engineering discourse community—have raised concerns of the ability of such programs to provide writing support to engineering students. University Writing Centers Engineering departments also commonly refer doctoral students to campus writing centers, even though research on engineering doctoral students’ willingness to work with campus writing centers suggest that they are the group most difficult to attract to this support service (Lala et al.,

2018). Research found that doctoral students who did seek writing center assistance primarily asked for help in learning the “conventions of their discipline, terminology, [and] the ‘moves’ commonly made in scholarly articles” (Kranov, 2009, p. 78). Yet, writing center resources often are overtaxed, especially those at larger institutions, and rarely have the ability to offer this type of continued, personalized support and feedback to students on discipline-specific writing within engineering. Writing centers are also typically staffed with those more accustomed to working with undergraduates—including undergraduate tutors—that may not understand the complexity of writing at the doctoral level. Indeed, studies have shown that more than half of the writing centers in the United States do not offer any dedicated training for staff working with graduate students (Phillips, 2013, p. 3). Moreover, writing center time-limit constraints on individual meetings are arguably not long enough to work through written genres commonly found at the doctoral level. In the rare case that there is a graduate writing center housed on campus, staff may work with a student to produce a “clean” document for faculty to critique in terms of technical work (Phillips, 2016); however, depending on the type of personalized writing support received, students may fail to understand how and when to apply and adapt conventions to different texts they write in the future. Thus, although the writing center exists as a traditional and formal means to provide doctoral students with writing support, the student demands on these existing programs and their lack of knowledge of graduate-level writing—including writing within specific disciplines—might limit their accessibility and effectiveness. Engineering Faculty Indeed, graduate mentoring is generally prized among many engineering faculty. Not only are faculty reward structures dependent on the success of graduate students (theses and dissertations supervised, awards received, prestigious job placements), students in turn are critical to faculty research success and publications. Engineering graduate faculty thus serve a role as intellectual and professional mentors and also prepare students to be competitive for employment (Kranov, 2009). Yet, studies that have surveyed engineering faculty reveal that student guidance on academic writing is not considered to be integral to their role as mentor. Graduate engineering faculty view the teaching of academic writing as a task that adds to their already heavy workloads, and one that can be detrimental to a faculty member’s research productivity (Gassman et al., 2013). Arguably, therefore, engineering faculty who may be the most knowledgeable about the conventions and expectations of writing in the field are so deeply engaged in their work that they may lack the time—or pedagogical knowledge—to formally introduce these norms, conventions, and genres to doctoral students. Instead, students are left to observe and absorb discipline-specific writing practices from the literature they read. Other institutional departments—including those such as technical communication programs— also express concern over engineering faculty taking on the responsibility to teach writing: “if engineers, untrained in technical communication pedagogy, incorporate written and oral communication into their courses, it is possible that they may do so incorrectly, thus jeopardizing student skills” (Williams, 2001, p. 77). Research done by Gassman et al. (2013) similarly concludes that many doctoral supervisors in engineering themselves learned disciplinary writing

through trial and error, thus receiving no training in learning how to write—and subsequently—teach writing in the disciplines (p. 699). An answer, therefore, to whose responsibility it is to provide academic and professional graduate writing support to engineers rests on strong ideological and epistemological assumptions within and across institutional departments. While it could be argued that all stakeholders above play a role in writing support for graduate students in engineering, Youra (1999) cautions that by spreading responsibility so widely, then unfortunately no one may be held accountable. Specific details on how engineering departments both in the United States and internationally have approached the teaching of academic and professional writing at the doctoral level are included below. Engineering Approaches to Academic and Professional Writing at the Doctoral Level Doctoral-level writing support within engineering specifically is a relatively new frontier, evident by the majority of Colleges of Engineering still relying on graduate faculty to provide feedback on texts or contracting writing support to outside institutional departments. Moreover, false assumptions remain on how much access engineering graduate students have had to the genres commonly found at the doctoral and professional level. Nonetheless, there have been a number of writing support initiatives both in the U.S. and internationally that have emerged in response to concerns about on supporting graduate student writers with composing doctoral-level genres in engineering. Below, I identify and detail the variety of approaches to writing that such initiatives take. It should be noted that detailed descriptions of these writing support initiatives were at times lacking, especially in regards to the specific theories that underpin the creation of such initiatives and their pedagogical practices. Nonetheless, the following studies do give some insight into how engineering is approaching the teaching of academic and professional writing at the doctoral level. Faculty as Academic Writing Mentors The main strategy to academic and professional writing in even some of the most respected Engineering universities is to let students naturally absorb information on academic and professional writing during their graduate career, and leave any remaining gaps to be filled in by receiving feedback and instruction from their faculty advisor (Kranov, 2009). Yet, heavy workloads of graduate faculty often constrain the amount, quality, and type of feedback given on writing. Research has shown that graduate faculty—pressed for time—prefer to provide focused feedback on technical content rather than the mechanics and the rhetorical issues of writing (Jordan & Kedrowicz, 2011). That is, faculty focus on “the research, ideas, and conclusions and direct comments towards what they clearly perceive to be the science content rather than spend time on what they perceive to be more general, less technical writing concerns” (p. 7). However, faculty have also indicated that their preference to address technical content in feedback is often put aside for addressing issues such as grammatical and syntactical errors that were interfering with reader comprehension of the text (Craig, 2005; Kranov, 2009). Distracted by sentence-level surface errors, professors often focus on correcting grammar instead of commenting on topics such as content and rhetorical issues. However, this approach seemingly

contradicts findings from studies, such as those from Kranov (2009), that show doctoral students tend to be more concerned about organization and rhetorical issues of disciplinary texts rather than sentence-level grammatical issues (p. 8). Thus, advisor-advisee relationships in relation to graduate writing mentorship tend to be more complex than they may initially appear and are often conflicted regarding the type of feedback students need and receive. In a similar vein, Kranov (2009) noted that graduate students in engineering thought faculty would benefit from development opportunities geared towards better addressing graduate-level writing issues, while faculty categorically rated this solution as least effective way in addressing writing issues of students. In addition, Jenkins (1993) found that graduate faculty members would re-write anywhere from 11-25% of their students’ theses. Thus, it appears that advisors tend to take on more an role of copy editor than that of writing mentor. The strategies listed above are not necessarily sustainable for graduate faculty nor supportive to students who are learning to create an academic and professional “writing persona” (Becker, 1986) as well as taking on a “authorial voice” (Hyland, 2002). Engineering-Based Graduate Writing Centers One writing support initiative that has been undertaken in Colleges of Engineering has been the development of college-specific writing centers, with the few institutions that have established engineering-based graduate writing centers reporting more success than general writing centers (Ford & Riley, 2003). These centers focus on training graduate students within a specific engineering discipline to work with incoming doctoral students on their writing, which positions these types of centers to become part of the a sustainable type of support—that is, support operated and sustained by the department without additional resources—that many engineering educators have called for. Additionally, these types of writing center environments place importance on collaborative relationships with the engineering graduate faculty, helping those faculty also develop strategies to serve as effective student mentors for the writing process (Kranov, 2009). As Kranov (2009) argues, this type of writing center support produces an environment where “students learn through interaction with faculty and peers to become members of their disciplinary communities” that “mimics the adult learning communities that they are most likely to encounter after finishing their degrees and beginning their professional lives, thus fostering life-long learning skills” (Kranov, 2009). Scientific Writing Learning Communities The creation of “scientific writing learning communities” has been another pedagogical model that has been shown to be highly popular in addressing doctoral level academic and professional writing within engineering. Researchers and practitioners have recently argued that current program designs aimed at improving academic writing at the doctoral level in engineering are “knee-jerk models of writing instruction (i.e., offering prepatory writing classes)” that don’t fit “within students’ existing academic networks and learning rhythms” (Simpson, 2012, p. 102). The current support models, the authors argue, separate graduate curriculum and writing, isolating service entities (such as writing centers) to a random location across campus that should instead be suffused across the engineering departments.

As a result, Engineering colleges and departments across the nation have also moved towards developing writing support services that act as scientific learning communities. It should be noted that the definition of learning community—a “high-impact educational practice”— over the years has come to take on a variety of meanings, with many researchers noting the term has been significantly diluted over the years from its original meaning. Learning community as it is used here is simply a: “[group] of people engaged in intellectual interaction for the purpose of learning”; a community that is a pragmatic and effective means of educating students as these students get “involved in thinking, questioning, and actively seeking knowledge” (Cross, 1998, p. 9). Both faculty-to-student and peer-to-peer mentorship on academic and professional writing have been an integral focus of these scientific learning communities, whose aims largely center around providing a supportive, sustainable network for both professional and personal development through collaboration, knowledge sharing, and analysis. I will briefly introduce examples of learning communities developed within Colleges of Engineering—including that of New Mexico Tech and the École de Technologie Supérieure in Montreal, Canada—that have reported both success and challenges. STEM Fellows Simpson et al. (2015) sought to address the lack of graduate level-writing support of engineering students at their institution, New Mexico Tech, a university who has strong specialized programs in areas such as mechanical engineering, atmospheric and astrophysics, earth sciences, and petroleum engineering. Simpson and colleagues developed a graduate STEM Communication Fellows program aimed at “creating opportunities to develop organic, student-run programs catering to the writing activities most suitable for students’ disciplines and to develop more community among graduate students” (p. 2). STEM fellows as a program recruited graduate students from three disciplines (Earth and Environmental Science (EES), Physics, and Mechanical Engineering (MENG), with the fellows being chosen by respective departmental graduate faculty based on their written communicative proficiency and awareness of their own writing processes (Simpson et al., 2015). As a STEM fellow, students were initially trained and continuously mentored by graduate faculty in peer tutoring and reviewing writing samples. In iterations of the program, former STEM fellows mentored new fellows into processes and techniques. The overall experiences and success of the STEM fellows program for each of the three departments largely depended on departmental culture and student needs. For example, in the EES department, STEM fellows and graduate faculty conceived a one-hour credit, in-house writing seminar. In the seminar, enrolled students devoted time to thesis-related writing or drafts of National Science Foundation grant proposals. Every two to three weeks, students in the seminar would take time to peer review a writing sample they were currently working on to ensure that discipline-specific terms were explained, general relevance of the proposed project was emphasized, and methodology was described concisely and in detail (Simpson et al., 2015). Overall, students found that the seminar to be helpful, and even continued on to form their own informal writing group after leaving the course. After speaking with graduate faculty on what they perceived as areas of improvement for graduate student writing, STEM fellows in MENG developed a bi-weekly peer review writing

session focused on structure and organization of writing, and clearly defining ideas and the significance of student research. Unlike EES, however, STEM fellows in MENG seemingly showed disinterest in the sessions, as three weeks into meetings, no graduate students attended. When MENG students were surveyed on why this was the case, STEM fellows found that most MENG students believed formal writing coursework was the only effective way to develop writing habits and skills. MENG students also had historically worked on research independently and in various laboratories across campus, and degree specializations within the department all required different coursework; thus, students in the department felt no true connection to come together as peers for writing purposes (Simpson et al., 2015). Assessment on the STEM fellows program and how it created a community of writers across graduate departments at New Mexico Tech was mixed. As mentioned above, departmental culture played a large role in whether or not students saw peer-based writing support programs as worthwhile; graduate students who were more likely to be isolated in their research and laboratory settings saw less value in writing collaboration with peers and preferred more formal learning arenas within an actual course. As such, the authors recommended facilitating early discussion with graduate students on the complexity of graduate-student writing, which many might not see as valuable until the later years of their degree; it was also recommended to stress the importance of peer collaboration during the writing process, which builds an “architecture of apprenticeship” between advanced and novice graduate students and provides a “student-centered design” of academic and professional writing that is potentially more sustainable than alternative options. Microcosm of a Scientific Community In a similar vein, Canadian scholars Lala et al. (2018) sought to create a “microcosm of the scientific community at large in order to give students practical experience and feedback in writing and evaluating scientific texts” (p. 1). Their community program development was centered around the aim to have continuous and accessible support for engineering graduate students in their writing endeavors without having to devote more resources—such as time and staff—as the numbers of students in the community increases. The authors envisioned this sustainable writing support as including the following characteristics: (1) personalized feedback on individual writing, (2) shared expertise between students, (3) increased motivation to write, (4) additional experience reviewing academic and professional writing, and (5) the minimizing of doctoral student isolation. The program initiative was led by four engineering graduate faculty and two staff members at the institution and initially began with the simple idea of supporting graduate students in the writing and publication of scientific articles by creating a website including a series of guides on scientific style, article writing, and peer review. These guides—aimed at “familiarizing engineering graduate students with the academic publication process (including peer review, rounds of revisions, etc.)” (Lala et al., 2018, p. 7)—were the starting point for four subsequent initiatives to get farther advanced graduate students helping those who had less experience with their scientific writing. The first initiative was a peer review service that allowed students to receive feedback on their scholarly writing from fellow peers. To recruit reviewers and students to this service, a cash-prize contest was created that asked students to submit a two-page abstract to be reviewed by professors in the college. Prizes

were given out for best abstract and best review. Once the peer review service was established in the learning community, students regularly submitted papers to the Open Journal System software and received comments on “impressions of clarity and narrative of the text” and the “quality of language” (p. 10). Graduate students in engineering were also provided the opportunity to participate in abstract writing and reviewing contests. These contests were held using different themes. As one example, students were asked to choose from a list of scientific publications written by professors at the institutions, summarizing the content of those publications in 1000 words or less with the “goal of making it accessible to a layperson” (Lala et al., 2018, p. 11). Submissions were evaluated by professors at the institution, thus obtaining more involvement from graduate faculty and communities. Other techniques to build sustainable writing support included writing blitz activities and writing support groups. The writing blitz activities—which involved writing sessions divided into multiple 25 minute blocks to write without distraction—were aimed at helping learners conceive of the time it takes to develop a piece of disciplinary writing. Writing support groups were also developed based on student need to receive personalized feedback on writing, on a regular basis, and with a short turnaround time. Students, with guidance from graduate faculty, met on a regular basis to exchange work and provide peer feedback. Students then revised texts and brought those texts with them to the next meeting, held bi-monthly. Lala et al. (2018) found that a learning community culture indeed began to develop through these four activities, driven by students providing and developing communicative assistance for other students. The authors found that students greatly improved their ability to give advice—offering “diverse perspectives on the writing as well as feedback on the clarity of the ideas presented” (p.15). These activities furthermore helped develop social bonds between students and also with graduate faculty which help cut down on feelings of isolation typically experienced as a doctoral student. Academic Writing Coursework For engineering, graduate-level, credit-bearing writing courses that have the objective of fostering disciplinary language and research literacy are rare in the United States (Kranov, 2009). However, writing courses of this type have received support internationally, especially within Australia and the United Kingdom. As Kranov (2009) explains, “Their institutions of higher education and their national governments have come together to create national agendas based on the belief that graduate programs have the fundamental responsibility to grow the writing skills that will enable students to publish their research findings in academic and professional contexts. And, increasingly, these programs have focused on inducting the graduate students into the “extended rhetorical conventions and discipline specific conventions” (p. 16). A survey of courses, for instance, at Australian universities showed a great variation: Professional Communication for Engineers; Communication and Critical Analysis; Engineering Communication; Presenting Academic Discourse – Engineering Stream; Analysis and Writing; and English for Professional Purposes. In the United States, courses focused on academic writing at the graduate level are less common and vary widely according to institutional context and departmental culture. Moreover, those

courses are typically housed in technical communication programs or language education departments, although there are instances of discipline-specific writing courses housed within engineering departments themselves. Detailed below are examples of such courses that have been developed nationwide, additionally providing insight into how engineering scholars have collaborated with international partner universities in providing writing support for engineers. Discipline-Specific Courses Research on discipline-specific writing courses within the field of engineering (Wolfe, 2009) has shown that these types of courses tend to be squeezed into the curriculum where they will not interfere with the “hard” content of the primary engineering discipline; moreover, these courses are typically physically housed outside of colleges, with students often have to walk across campus to get to these classes, reinforcing the preconception that writing is something separate from their core course work. Research has also shown that disciplinary writing courses tend to be met with some faculty resistance (Kranov, 2009). In general, faculty consider the teaching of writing in the discipline at the graduate level unnecessary since a writing course is not considered to be ‘technical’ and that students typically have had years of writing instruction and experience prior to entering graduate school. Nonetheless, there have been case studies at particular institutions that provide insight into what a discipline-specific, or quasi discipline-specific, writing course may look like for doctoral graduate students in engineering. At the University of South Carolina, a doctoral-level engineering course, titled Writing for Publication, was created with the desired outcome of having each doctoral student prepare a manuscript ready, or near ready, for submission to an engineering journal (Gassman et al., 2013). Through the use and pre-and post-course surveys provided to both students enrolled in the course and their graduate mentors, the researcher practitioners sought to understand whether or not certain course activities improved their development as a disciplinary writer, and also increased their confidence. The course was instructed by faculty from the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, the College of Education, and the Office of Research and Graduate Education. Students enrolled in the course represented the research efforts of nine civil engineering professors across four diverse areas of civil engineering (environmental engineering, structural engineering, transportation engineering, and water resources engineering) (Gassman et al., 2013). Course content addressed the purpose and information typically included in the standard four sections of an engineering research article. The weekly course sessions were structured as “writing workshops” that were supplemented with faculty presentations, group discussions, and class activities (p. 4). Course activities, presentations, and discussions focused on a variety of topics, including the following: locating relevant literature for student manuscripts, creating literature concepts maps to organize disciplinary knowledge, identifying fruitful areas of investigation, creating and presenting meaningful figures, applying rubrics to their own writing along with soliciting peer-to-peer feedback, and honing writing skills through creating advanced manuscript drafts (p. 4). Instructors and visiting faculty to the class would always present an interactive lecture on a given topic before students dedicated time to applying material covered in the lecture to their own manuscripts. The authors found that these activities did indeed help students learn how to locate primary literature, organize disciplinary knowledge, improve writing skills through successive drafts of manuscripts, and successfully employ rubrics to solicit and

provide peer-to-peer feedback. However, the authors also noted that students enter the course with varying levels of communicative competence, thus some activities were not as equally beneficial depending on that level. Scholars at Purdue University, Calumet have also put forth thoughts on a variety of pedagogical techniques to incorporate into writing courses for doctoral students in engineering. Collwell et al. (2011), in their experience coaching and mentoring students in producing scholarly written work, found four areas that they argued students found challenging: mechanics, attribution of sources, academic honesty, and writing in a second language (p. 6). The authors suggest a variety of techniques that they argue will help graduate advisors and educators improve writing in regards to the aforementioned difficulties. Students extensively reading the type of work that they are expected to produce was one suggestion. Yet, the authors contend that “a graduate advisor or faculty member cannot assume that merely reading this type of work will be enough for the student—they must practice critiquing it as well” (p. 7). Similar to Gassman et al. (2013), the authors also suggest student creation of concept maps to classify relevant topics and literature, and to plan out dedicated time to the writing process. Receiving feedback on writing and then editing work is also recommended, as was an explicit emphasis from faculty that the writing process includes not only writing but rewriting, with revision being an expected and vital part of the process. Moreover, the authors recommended the use of style manuals, existing university resources (such as writing centers), and deconstructing existing scholarly works, although there was no extensive discussion on how or why these recommendations would necessarily improve the writing of doctoral students. Internationally, Troy & Liang (2019) created a scientific writing course for PhD students in the School of Biomedical Engineering at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China. The course was instructed by one local professor and one visiting professor from the United States. Students were chosen to participate in the course based on their interest in written performance and current proficiency of English language. The instructors of the course provided lectures on topics such as organization of a scientific paper, writing style, presentation of figures, sentence and paragraph construction, awareness of the reader, and the submission of manuscript for publication. Also required for the course was one-on-one tutoring with the instructors to improve a manuscript already under preparation. However, with more than 200 students enrolling in subsequent iterations of the course (from institutional colleges other than engineering), instructors could no longer offer one-on-one help with manuscripts. Instead, students were asked to present posters with a shortened version of work detailed in the manuscript. Although not specifically outlining a developed course, Berdanier (2019) did examine how the teaching and learning of disciplinary writing through a genre lens may support graduate students’ “academic literacy and fluency in their disciplinary community” (p. 378). She iterates the importance of graduate students acquiring the conventionalized and established patterns of disciplinary discourse and argumentation in order to become part of the engineering academic community. Focusing her research on the rhetorical patterns that engineering graduate students commonly use when writing research proposals—one common genre within engineering—Berdanier sought to understand how the argumentation patterns found may be visualized to provide useful heuristics for students’ understanding of engineering writing (p. 378). Through a corpus analysis of 50 research proposals submitted for the National Science Foundation Graduate

Research Fellowship Program (NSF GRFP) and a subsequent move structure analysis, the author found that proposals can be categorized into four different argumentation patterns. Berdanier (2019) provided several implications for engineering writing education through her analysis. First, the author found that writing proposals can follow a cyclic-nature which helps develop an overall effective argument. In turn, pointing this out to graduate students may help them understand that paragraphs do not always need to progress linearly through a document—one of the simplest ways to teach writing of proposals (p. 390). Second, through mapping out proposals, it may be illuminated to students that sentences have ‘roles’ within an argument, that sentences may play multiple ‘roles’ at the same time, and that they can construct an argument structure that fits best with their particular purpose for writing (p. 390). Indeed, as the author argues, this research might serve students in understanding that there are various “argumentation” shapes that can be employed for a variety of different purposes: “Students may use these shapes or genre maps as heuristics by which they might imagine what the argumentation structure for their particular purposes might look like. Similarly, students may be guided to consider using their genre maps to discuss the emphasis of their written work in characterizing how much of a document is allotted to each move” (p. 390). This pragmatic approach to writing, the author argues, is something that has been lost in writing pedagogy within engineering. Current approaches in engineering writing contexts also do not account for the highly fluid, contextual, and ideological nature of disciplinary writing, as Berdanier notes, “Students should be taught that genre extends past “types” of writing tasks (e.g., memos, résumés, laboratory reports) and to consider the disciplinary value systems of the audience to motivate rhetorical decisions” (p. 391). Discussion of Approaches and Initiatives The studies detailed above show that a number approaches to teaching or providing feedback on academic writing still seem to point to a focus on sentence-level structure, or to the notion of writing as process that develops both organization and meaning, as is evident by focus on writing strategies, multiple drafts, and formative feedback by both peers and instructors. What can also be deduced from the case studies and analyses is that a number of scholars in the field of engineering have looked to the concept of genre to inform their writing instruction (e.g., Berdanier, 2019; Gassman et al., 2013, Simpson et al., 2015, Troy & Liang, 2019), although there at times remains a disconnect and lack in detail regarding (1) what approach to genre is being taken up by scholars, and (2) how certain conceptualizations of genre are being applied pedagogically. Studies also point to engineering exploring and acknowledging the relationship between text and context, as writing support initiatives are not only situated within a College of Engineering, but also within specific disciplines, thus recognizing that writing is used to create knowledge in different ways in different communities and social contexts (e.g., Gassman et al., 2013; Simpson et al., 2015). However, with the exception of Berdanier (2019), there was little emphasis on how these initiatives accounted for power dynamics between, for instance, professors and students as well as peer-to-peer roles and relations. Moreover, no questions were posed as to how these initiatives and pedagogical practices may support or challenge these power structures and “ways of doing” of the dominant culture that may perpetuate social inequities (Benesch, 2001), especially in regards to multilingual students—a population that constitutes the majority of students pursuing doctoral degrees in engineering.

These various approaches to doctoral and professional writing within engineering hold a number of insights for doctoral-level writers in the field. While there are cases of approaches—such as that of New Mexico Tech (Simpson, 2013)—that provide comprehensive, structured writing support for engineering students, this type of support still remains to be quite “fragmented.” Caplan and Cox (2016) note that this fragmentation may be a result of decentralized structure of graduate programs in the United States. It also means that the spread of support across institutions could make it difficult: for students to utilize such support; for institutional programs to connect, establish, and coordinate writing support; and for scholars to assess the status of support implemented. In addition, this fragmentation can also be seen in what appears to be a division regarding favored pedagogical practices of scholars, professionals, and institutional departments. This division may be due to—among many other factors—(1) pre-existing assumptions on writing at the doctoral level; (2) lack of knowledge of existing academic writing research at the doctoral level; (3) or those who have background in, for instance, technical communication versus those who come from the field of TESOL, second language studies, or applied linguistics. This fragmentation and variation in pedagogical practices within the context of graduate-level writing support in engineering may be even more significant when case of multilingual graduate students. Multilingual Learners in Engineering Below, brief speculations are made on the implications of these approaches for multilingual doctoral students in engineering, concentrating on how they may support or hinder doctoral students in integrating their established ways of meaning making with those of a disciplinary culture. Faculty feedback practices such as solely focusing on sentence-level issues or technical content undermine that fact that multilingual learners must adjust their already established meaning-making practices on multiple dimensions, including linguistic, rhetorical, and cultural dimensions. This departure—if you will—from students’ already established practices may be larger for multilingual learners depending on home educational systems. Additionally, graduate faculty opting to re-write portions of student texts may be evidence that there is a general misunderstanding of not only how writing plays a central role in “disciplinary becoming” (Dressen-Homouda, 2008, p. 234), and practices that give students agency and support students in gaining access to—or resisting—disciplinary discourses. Multilingual students may (at least tacitly) expect continuous and explicit feedback on their writing as it develops, where their advisers may be more focused on the finished products of articles, dissertations, or theses (Belcher, 1994; Leki, 2006) or may expect them to acquire writing knowledge on their own or "on the job" (Kranov, 2009; Krase, 2007). Moreover, faculty attitudes towards working with and supporting the disciplinary writing of multilingual graduate students tend to be mixed and sometimes uninformed—thus creating even more complicated dynamics and ideas about language and doctoral-level writing within engineering. As noted earlier, faculty members often expect that multilingual learners will arrive in doctoral programs already “enculturated” into the various academic genres of their field, although students come from diverse linguistic, cultural, literacy, and educational backgrounds.

The perspective of faculty members in engineering is often to conflate language and literacy with simply needing to improve English grammar to become ‘good writers’ at the doctoral level. A question also remains whether graduate communication support designed with peer collaboration in mind—such as in the case of graduate writing centers and learning communities—can fully serve the diverse needs of those who enter programs with diverse linguistic, cultural, literacy, and educational backgrounds. Many multilingual doctoral students bring with them culturally specific academic, professional, and broader rhetorical strategies that may conflict with locally defined and field-specific conventions in engineering. Multilingual learners may also be may be reticent in interacting with advisers or peers because of actual or perceived problems with English proficiency, which can impede the usefulness of such resources (Dong, 1998; Leki, 2006). In addition, it is also necessary to consider whether or not disciplinary community members have background knowledge in second language writing and acquisition. Because of the diversity of educational backgrounds, proficiency in language and communication of multilingual graduate students, and of their needs and strengths as writers, it is necessary for institutions to consider and alter continuously the types of writing support available for this population of doctoral students. Conclusion

Candid discussions about writing support initiatives and pedagogical practices supporting doctoral students in their academic and professional writing are usually rare within and across engineering departments and their institutions. In the U.S. context, any type of sustained writing support for doctoral students outside of faculty members is usually quite limited, and the type of support offered largely depends on both institutional and departmental contexts and resources. From the studies detailed above, it is obvious that some engineering departments across the U.S. and internationally have made substantial strides in attempting to address the need and demand for graduate writing support at the doctoral level. However, it is also worthwhile for the field as a whole to reassess and think more strategically about their efforts as they continue to develop writing support and pedagogy. Echoing concerns from Berdanier (2019), it would be worthwhile for the field to ensure that support and pedagogical practices are both theoretically and pedagogically sound. Additional factors that should be accounted for in assessing current support include student backgrounds, needs and academic/professional goals, logistical and budgetary obstacles, the combination or separation of support for L1 and L2 doctoral-level writers, and whether or not students and other stakeholders see these services as valuable and worthwhile. Finally, it is also necessary to address value systems and ideologies involved in teaching to academic and professional discourse as it is currently constructed, and to what extent students should be taught to question or resist these discursive norms and conventions. References

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