I Ain't No English Teacher

The promise of articulate engineers able to construct concise papers directing their audiences to exact interpretations is the wish of all engineering departments. Engineers who are both well versed in their areas of expertise and able to convey this information have been a goal of colleges of engineering for decades. English departments on every campus in the country have performed the task of giving information on writing and sometimes presentation skills to engineering students on a one or two class basis. This one-time basis has constituted an engineer's indoctrination into communication skills (mostly attached to skills oriented to the arts and letters). Once this internship is over, the experience (whether good or bad) is placed behind (usually on a cold, back burner), and the engineers immerse themselves in their technical study, usually devoid of communication skill concern. The time has arrived for a simple fact to be made known. The most important role models in the area of communication skills are individuals who have always been in the engineering student's sight, the engineering professors. Professors in the engineering departments, as in most majors, are the focal point of their students, and their words far outdistance comments from individuals outside the major area. By uniting the faculty in a concerted effort to explore and improve communication skills, both engineering students and the world in general will profit. By analyzing what is done in each course in the engineer's major, by creating a continuum of communication skill instruction and evaluation in every department, and by utilizing in-place (through careful discussion) technical assignments to emphasize needed communication; the engineering student will be more willing to accept and investigate the need for communication skills. This paper addresses a widely ignored fact, "Engineering professors ARE English teachers!" They do not teach literature or the structure of the novel. They do not provide grammar quizzes every Friday. And they certainly don't give popular movie reviews of all the shows they watched on a given weekend. On the other hand, they spend a great deal of their professional lives writing journal articles and conference papers, reviewing articles written by other faculty, and being the mentors for untold numbers of theses and dissertations. It would be an interesting study to see how many faculty members never made any comment on all those above theses and dissertations that they have received from their students. Life as an engineering faculty member requires the writing and review of two major documents, the thesis and the dissertation. Even the youngest assistant professor has been closely connected to writing a spectacular document and what it means to do so. Faculty members should think beyond the technical assignments that are given to students to issues that are raised in their own writing and speaking. These activities are important to students so that they can see the necessity of communicating well for their future success. Students will more readily accept the premise that communication is a vital part of an engineer's life if they are given that information along with their technical material and in the context that college professors have to spend a great amount of time writing, too. This paper will look at the kinds of information that can be imparted to undergraduates through surveys of faculty on the variety of items that require change in those graduate theses and dissertations. Surveys will also be provided to address the students' attitudes toward being given communication suggestions from engineering faculty.