Producing engineering graduates with good writing and speaking skills has been a long-time objective of Northeastern University’s Civil Engineering program, and a priority often voiced by industry representatives. For many years, Northeastern has required an upper-class course in technical writing. However, feedback from students, alumni, and employers told us that an isolated course run by the English Department wasn’t enough. Encouraged by a gift from an alumnus who was passionate about writing, and building on several years of effort by some equally passionate faculty members, the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department developed a four-year systematic program in technical communication embedded in the civil engineering curriculum. It begins in lab courses with short but frequent reports (written and oral) involving feedback, redrafting, and continual reinforcement. In junior-level hydrologic and highway design courses, it involves progressively more extensive reports and presentations, and culminates in the senior-level capstone design course. Support from alumni has been overwhelming, with $625,000 contributed to endow the program and make it a permanent part of our curriculum.

Communication Education Principles

The Civil Engineering Communication Program is designed around three main principles. First, the desire to communicate is the greatest teacher. In a stand-alone technical writing course, students often end up writing or speaking about something they don’t really know or care about for an audience who doesn’t either. Even though they may be writing or speaking, in a sense they aren’t really trying to communicate. In contrast, when students are describing a design they created or results that they obtained in a lab, there is a natural desire to communicate the value and validity of their own work. That desire motivates them to seek effective formats for graphics, to organize their presentation in a way that’s logical and easy to follow, and to write more clearly.

Second, effective communication is part of engineering. In the past, we had writing experts grade student papers on writing, while the engineering professor graded them on technical content. Students were often frustrated at serving two masters, and tended to despise the communication grade. At the same time, engineering instructors who take an interest in writing find that it is difficult to distinguish between good writing and good engineering, because both have the same basis: good thinking. If the task is to evaluate alternatives, is a logical and compelling comparison good writing or good engineering? If the task is to analyze data, is a clear and insightful graphic good communication or good engineering? In the current program, we avoid giving separate grades for writing, which means that the instructor or teaching assistant who judges student writing or speaking has to be competent in engineering.

Industry Board Provides Advice, and then Some

Northeastern’s Civil and Environmental Engineering Department has an Industrial Advisory Board (IAB) composed of civil engineering leaders, most of them alumni, who support the Department’s mission. The idea of a fund for teaching communication skills struck a nerve with members of the board, who recognized that they owed a lot of their own success to an acquired ability to write and speak well. The IAB effectively adopted the communication program as their project: they reviewed planning documents; they participated in a day-long workshop along with communication experts and consultants they brought from their own companies; one member even served as a volunteer communication consultant for that year’s senior design projects. And they gave and gave, with the greater part of the program’s $625,000 endowment coming from IAB members, their colleagues, and companies. The genius of an endowment is that it gives the program permanence. There is also a genius in support from an organized board: it provides a mechanism of accountability that has kept the program on course through the hurdles of implementation. And that gives an incentive for the faculty to assess, improve, and deliver on the programs worthy objectives.

The third principle is that people learn to communicate well by redrafting based on feedback. While this is not a controversial position, realistic pressures on the engineering curriculum often leave little time or manpower for these demanding but valuable exercises. Implementing the program involved many deliberate adjustments to course schedules and curricular materials to provide the time needed for redrafting, and to clarify expectations related to communication. The program’s endowment supports a dedicated teaching assistant, the “Civil Engineering Communication Fellow,” who grades and edits lab reports, videotapes group oral presentations for students to review later in peer-critique and self-critique sessions, and coaches students preparing for oral presentations.

Path Forward

Northeastern’s Civil Engineering Communication Program is now in its fourth year. Implementation in lab classes is well established. In the upper-class design courses, instructors incorporate feedback and redrafting on written projects and oral presentations; however, further development is still needed to establish the program in a way that will be sustained as instructors change.

Another important task remaining is to develop effective mechanisms for assessment. The first class of students to benefit from the full program will graduate in Spring 2007. Feedback from students, and casual observation of their written and oral presentations, is enormously positive. Faculty members teaching upper level courses see the improvement in student writing, and both faculty and practitioners see a rise in the quality of capstone reports and presentations. However, we need to define more objective measures of success that can be used to evaluate the program and to guide its continual improvement.

Conclusion

Northeastern University’s Civil Engineering program has taken on the challenge of teaching effective communication by developing a systematic program of progressive instruction and exercise. It is embedded in engineering laboratory and design courses; here, students’ natural desire to communicate the value of their own work motivates them to find effective ways of writing and speaking. To provide the necessary feedback and redrafting opportunities, course curricula have been revised and a dedicated Civil Engineering Communication Fellow position created. Now in its fourth year, the program shows strong though informal indications of success. Its implementation has proven the viability of the concept of teaching effective communication as part of engineering, rather than as a separate topic.

Peter G. Furth, Ph.D., is Professor and Chair of the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Northeastern University. He has been a professor for twenty-fi ve years, including nine years as director of the undergraduate program in Civil Engineering. Peter can be reached via e-mail at pfurth@coe.neu.edu.