2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Graduate students in STEM fields are often expected to communicate – both in writing and orally – at a professional level by the time they submit their theses and dissertations. Unfortunately, many graduate students lack opportunities to learn how to do that in a STEM setting. An informal review of US programs revealed that many offer writing courses modeled on traditional composition courses, which are not necessarily directed to the needs of STEM students. Further, many of these courses provide a series of isolated learning modules with little continuity or encouragement to revise and in which technological writing assistance is discouraged. This paper describes a collaboration between the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the STEM Librarian for Engineering & Chemistry at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB), a large R1 university. The result was the reinvention of Technical Communication for Engineers – a comprehensive graduate course in writing and presenting for academic, scientific audiences. The course design combined elements of general audience writing courses with those of science and technology courses. For this course, assignments were delivered in a project-based learning format whereby each assignment combined to produce a conference-style paper and presentation. The use of writing-assistive technology was encouraged. This course was also designed to introduce engineering graduate students, many of whom are international students, to a wide variety of resources available to students on campus, including the UAB University Writing Center, the Center for Clinical and Translational Science, and the UAB Libraries Office of Scholarly Communication.