Something to Write Home(work) About: An Analysis of Writing Exercises in Fluid Mechanics Textbooks

Writing has been identified as a critical skill and element of the engineering profession, yet it is rarely included in sophomore and junior level courses. Reflecting on our own prior efforts to develop writing assignments for such courses, we became curious about the extent to which the most popular engineering textbooks include writing prompts and related writing activities. This question seemed particularly important given that textbooks often play critical roles in engineering curricula and courses. Textbooks often influence how courses are structured, and reading assignments and homework problems are frequently assigned directly from textbooks. In this project, we systematically searched for and analyzed writing-based problems in six popular fluid mechanics textbooks, with a focus on chapters with similar technical content. We focused our efforts on identifying learning activities that could potentially allow students to practice writing, to learn through writing, and to use writing to relate course content to broader applications and contexts. We discuss our findings by classifying the types of writing prompts found, and we give recommendations for how professors could easily include writing in their courses with some of the textbooks that are already most commonly used. The result of this analysis will be an understanding of how well popular fluid mechanics textbook assignments guide students in writing, and how well the textbooks equip instructors to make use of those assignments. Some possible directions for further research are also proposed.