{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02566633761105627, 'fraction_numerical': 0.002303389272787101, 'mean_word_length': 5.268041237113402, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Writing Like an Engineer: A Rhetorical Education [Book Revews]

It comes as no surprise that Dorothy Winsor is the first author in the new Erlbaum series on Rhetoric, Knowledge, and Society, as edited by Charles Bazerman. Winsor has won an enviable number of National Council of Teachers of English awards for excellence in scientific and technical communication. Winsor’s work has served as a model for solid research in our field, introducing students to not only thoughtful balance of theory, methodology, and practice but also reflexivity or self-awareness by the researcher of the stance, bias, or interpretive choices she brings to her observations. And Winsor’s research has flourished in the environment in which she taught: until fall 1996, for a great many years, the General Motors Institute of Engineering and Management, where students co-op within industry for six months of each year until they graduate. Finally, a great many readers, if not familiar with her research on the writing practices and education of students at GMI, will know Winsor’s fine work on the Challengerdisaster. Winsor’s Writing Like an Engineerlives up to her reputation. It contains rich detail, gathered from interviews with four students as they moved for five years through the GMI program. Because her sample size is small, Winsor is careful to speculate rather than generalize, and she respects the individuality of the students as they describe their writing experiences in unique settings and as they react to her analysis in “backtalk” sections at the end of chapters. The questions that she asks about the students’ experiences and perceptions are sophisticated and complex, as they shift her readers’ thinking about the rhetorical nature of engineering writing. And, finally, Winsor knows quite well the work of others in similar areas but weaves in these references and confirms, adds to, or questions these previous studies without intruding on the richly descriptive style of her own words. In focusing on the rhetorical qualities of persuasion and audience awareness, Winsor finds that her engineering students, as with many scientists and technologists, do not think that they are arguing for an interpretation or convincing an audience when they write but believe instead that they are conveying data or describing reality. They have this perception because of the “epistemologies and ideologies of their disciplinary communities” (p. 7). Thus Winsor finds that even though the engineering students become more aware of audience and that their writing tasks demand that they convince those audiences, they resist the notion that they are thinking and writing rhetorically, particularly early in their co-op experiences. However, when she examines the writing that the students produce, Winsor finds that engineering writing is indeed rhetorical—persuasive in that to “accomplish work” it must “change something”—and audience sensitive in that engineers’ relationships with their audiences are “interactive” and “recursive” (pp. 3–4).