What do engineers, computer scientists, and designers have in common? They all write to discover, hone and share their ideas. Tandon alumni tell us that writing skills are essential to their work and, in an American Society for Engineering Education poll, industry representatives named good communication skills as the most desired ability for new hires. Our writing courses are meant to prepare you for future success and to welcome you into a writing community right now.
Your writing course is a small, hands-on workshop. In class, you will discuss readings full of provocative questions and write exercises to build skills and explore your ideas. Just as iteration is crucial for engineering and design projects, drafting is crucial for writing projects: you must experiment and test your prototype (or draft) with users (or readers), and critically assess, reflect on and revise your initial ideas. Thus, you will read and respond to each other’s drafts, receive rich feedback from your instructor and craft a final draft that reflects this communal effort.
At Tandon, you will take two required first-year writing courses, beginning with Writing the Essay (WTE) or International Writing Workshop 1. Here, you will craft essays, a highly flexible form of writing that can be academic or popular, and develop a portable toolkit of reading, writing and revision skills. Then, you’ll build on these skills in the Advanced Writing for Engineers (AWE), which comes in several broad themes, in which you'll practice genres used by STEM professionals, including essays. Or you will continue on in International Writing Workshop 2, writing long-form essays that require independent research and explore STEM innovation, with particular attention to your audience.
We encourage you to make the most of our program’s built-in writing support. You have access to Tandon Writing Center, where you can work one-on-one with EWP faculty and experienced peer tutors. Much of the work you’ll do for class occurs outside of the classroom, which encourages you to build writerly self-reliance and confidence, even as you write within a community.
