I’m in a unique situation this semester, as all of my classes are team-taught: 2 sections of Sophomore Engineering Clinic, a second-year writing course for engineering students, is taught by 3 Writing Arts and 5 Engineering faculty; and 1 section of Intro to Writing Arts, required for all majors, is taught with Writing Arts colleagues, Jennifer Courtney and Sandy Tweedie.
Students in Soph Clinic have two main design projects: a bottle rocket, optimized for distance, and a crane truss, optimized to lift the most amount of weight for the lowest cost. I’ve been looking for readings to supplement the design and technical writing work students will be doing. My goal is to make my sections about ideas, communication, design, and revision, and I’ve been generating a list of readings from which I can select. I’ve pasted the listed below. Many of the readings are on rockets and bridges because they are directly related to the two design projects, but I’ve also sought to include readings that relate to Engineering students’ majors. Please feel free to use it if you can, and if you have additional suggestions, please let me know in the comments.
Intro to Writing Arts is a new course, with two primary goals: to introduce students to the major and help define the field “writing arts” or “writing studies.” The structure of the course is unique in that students rotate to each faculty member for 4 week modules (we meet as a whole class the first and last week). The modules are: History and Materiality of Writing; Issues in Writing; and Technologies and the Future of Writing. I am teaching the latter. I have also generated a list of possible readings that fall along the planned four one week units: Origins, Writing Spaces, Ownership and Identity, and the Future of Writing.
I have attached the lists as a Word docs because I could not get the formatting correct in the blog posting form.