2025 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

The importance of communication in engineering practice and the communication deficits of engineering graduates are enduring themes in engineering education. Perhaps more significantly, communication is the only domain in which engineering experts are consistently (if grudgingly) willing to yield space in the curriculum. Although there are ample intellectual resources available for designing and delivering communication instruction to engineering students, these resources have yet to be deployed in a systematic way, largely because most engineering faculty and administrators appear to be unaware of the existence of those resources. The vacuum produced by this knowledge gap has been filled by conventional wisdom that reduces engineering communication to technical writing and imagines the teaching and learning of technical writing as a joyless activity devoid of intellectual foundations and human significance. This paper puts forth the scholarship of Fred Newton Scott (1860-1931), professor of English and rhetoric at the University of Michigan, as a resource for articulating a view of engineering communication that is both humanistic and functional, humanistic because it is grounded in fundamental notions about human beings, their mental activities, and their social interactions, functional in the sense of being designed to achieve specific purposes. It draws on the history of English as a discipline and engineering communication as a subject to illuminate the sources of misconceptions and analyzes two of Scott’s many publications to delineate a success orientation to the teaching of engineering communication.