Meets the Ethos of Engineering : Process , Collaboration , and Disciplinary Practices

This paper considers some ways in which WAC theory can conflict with disciplinary practices in applied or technological fields like engineering , so that even though there is a significant demand in engineering education for improving students' communications skills, in many local institutional situations WAC theory and practices may have little actual effect on the kind of writing projects that are set up or on the ways in which students actually learn to write. This apparent failure to communicate or implement WAC knowledge between disciplines is hardly surprising , since a considerable amount of WAC theory, in the early days at least, was based on expressivist interest in personal writing and on the belief that students are given too few opportunities in school to use writing as a means of personal development and intellectual growth (Russell 278). WAC programs have conventionally promoted activities and ideas to generate " writing to learn " for students in all disciplines, very often without much inquiry into what other modes of learning are more common in those disciplines, or why this is so. Although we have made some progress in understanding the rhetoric of other disciplinary discourses (see, for example, Bazerman and Paradis), and although some programs call themselves " Writing in the Disciplines " in order to acknowledge their teaching of writing as disciplinary discourse, these are at best uneasy relationships. I still hear considerable frustration with " the engineering mentality " from writing people, and considerable suspicion on the part of engineers that " English " wants to determine their curricula. Departments " on the other side " of campus tend to buy into WAC not to foster students' general development as writers and learners, but in the hope that their students will learn—as quickly as possible—to write clearly and coherently and in what they perceive as a professional manner. When the process-driven theories of rhetoric and composition confront the product driven practices and traditions of engineering and business educa