2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Technical report writing is typically prevalent in all STEM-related undergraduate degrees including those in the field of mechanical engineering. The most common reports in a mechanical engineering undergraduate (UG) curriculum are lab and project based, although it should be noted that there has been an emphasis in recent years on reflective writing and argumentative pieces. This paper examines the different types of reports that students typically encounter, focusing on their benefit and educational premise, as well as analysing the data on the effects of imposed word limits on student performance. Technical writing skills are extremely important for engineers, but the style is very different to that which UG students have previously encountered. The curriculum at Imperial College London takes a structured approach to teaching technical report writing and provides large amounts of in-depth feedback. In a research environment, findings are presented in journal papers which often have word-limits; as such, to both manage the workload of students and staff, word-limits or page-limits with strict formatting guidance are often imposed. For a first year UG mechanics of materials lab report, students were not given a word-limit but were told that conciseness and brevity would contribute to their clarity of communication grade. As expected, those that were able to write more succinctly typically achieved higher scores. The data shows for students that did not fail that there is a weak positive correlation between the number of words used and the awarded grade up to a certain point, at which there is little or no correlation. This reaffirms the importance of succinctness in technical writing to improve clarity and reduce ambiguity. The average grades achieved in both instances were comparable (67.6 % and 66.9 % respectively) with similar standard deviations (9.4 % and 8.6 % respectively) demonstrating that imposing a word limit did not have a detrimental effect to the assessment process and allowed student performance to be differentiated successfully. This is highly beneficial to both staff and student workloads, whilst maintaining academic excellence and ensuring that all intended learning outcomes are still met.