Addressing Multiple Goals for Engineering Writing: The Role of Course-Specific Websites

Writing instruction for engineering students involves differing perspectives and in some cases conflicting goals of many stakeholders including future employers, accrediting associations, writing center staff, and faculty in engineering, English, composition, and technical writing programs. These perspectives and conflicts can be addressed through a bottomup approach to WAC and WID: course- specific websites, in which instructional materials that focus on writing tasks for a particular engineering course are both conceptually and electronically linked to other perspectives. By addressing specific tasks from multiple perspectives, course-oriented websites may help to build the consensus among disparate stakeholders necessary for more extensive efforts.