Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

Graduate engineering students must produce a wide variety of high-quality and discipline-specific work throughout their post-baccalaureate study.They are expected to have expertise in writing journal and conference papers, dissertations, and qualifying proposals, while learning to communicate in accordance with the norms and expectations of their specific disciplines.However, few students have such expertise at the start of their graduate program, nor do they formally acquire it as part of their coursework.Direct writing instruction in engineering graduate programs is scarce, and to the extent that curricular or co-curricular technical communication instruction is offered, it is often deemed remedial or separate from disciplinary content knowledge.As a consequence, writing is largely devalued, despite its outsized role