Engineering Writing for the General Public: A Classroom Approach

The University of Southern California’s Viterbi School of Engineering requires its undergraduates to take a semester-long course, Advanced Writing Communication for Engineers, to gain writing and public speaking skills. One specific goal of the course is to improve students’ abilities to write for a variety of audiences, including the general public. To this end, all students in the course submit articles to the Engineering Writing Program’s Illumin magazine, an online periodical whose purpose is to educate the public on the ways engineering affects our everyday lives. Illumin has a strong readership, providing students with a real audience to envision and invoke as they write. This paper provides background on Illumin magazine and presents a classroom approach developed by the author for teaching about writing for the general public. The approach centers on research by Jeanne Fahnestock that argues that “transforming” technical information for the public often involves a shift in genre, from the forensic, in which facts are established, to the epideictic, in which the subject is praised or celebrated. After a summary of Fahnestock’s work and the ways the author introduces the research in the classroom, the paper provides suggestions for discussion topics that the research raises. Fahnestock’s findings in the classroom usually spark debate on the persuasive and ethical nature of science writing that might seem “objective” to students or a general audience. The aim of this classroom approach is to enable students to better understand the rhetorical and ethical implications of writing for the general public and apply them to their Illumin articles and their own professional writing. The paper concludes with a case study to illustrate one student’s improvement from draft to final submission.