Penny Hirsch

Re-envisioning the Writing Requirement: An Interdisciplinary Approach

AT NORTHWESTERN, we recently had an opportunity to 1 re-envision the writing requirement for engineering students-to imagine what goals we wanted the requirement to accomplish and to decide the best means for accomplishing those goals. The resulting course, Engineering Design and Communication (EDC), is a partnership between the Engineering School and the Writing Program at Northwestern University. It is an interdisciplinary, two-quarter, team-taught course that is project-based, team-based, and equally focused on design and communication. We are currently in the third year of teaching this course and are offering it to more than 260 engineering freshmen. By next year, EDC will be a required course for all 380 engineering freshmen at Northwestern. We believe this course to be unique, not only in its interdisciplinary content but also in its approach to the writing requirement. However, conversations with colleagues and our own experience with the business school at Northwestern suggest that this interdisciplinary model for the writing requirement is highly generalizable; we suspect that there are many opportunities for developing collaborative courses that resemble EDC.

Integrating Design and Communication in Engineering Education: A Collaboration Between Northwestern University and the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago

Abstract The required course for freshmen in Northwestern University’s engineering school – a 2-quarter sequence called Engineering Design and Communication (EDC) – is noteworthy not only for its project-based focus on user-centered design, but also for its innovative integrated approach to teaching communication, teamwork, and ethics. Thanks to the collaboration between EDC faculty and staff at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, EDC students, at the beginning of their education, experience the excitement of solving problems for real clients and users. At the same time, these authentic design projects offer an ideal setting for teaching students how to communicate effectively to different audiences and perform productively as team members and future leaders in engineering.

Book Reviews : Competitive Communciation: A Rhetoric for Modern Business Barry Eckhouse. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. 288 pages. Corporate Communication, Second edition. Paul A. Argenti. Boston: Irwin McGraw-Hill, 1998.258 pages

MANY RECENT PUBLICATIONS in the business communication field have stressed electronic media. However, computers take a back seat to Aristotle in two texts that offer refreshing and innovative treatments of the classic fundamentals of communication. Paul A. Argenti’s Corporate Communication focuses on managing and maintaining successful interaction with the internal and external audiences of an organization. This highly readable text would be appropriate for courses in communications, public relations, and strategic planning. It could also be helpful to English, journalism, and technical writing undergraduates who lack a concentration of business courses but find themselves vying for corporate communications careers. I also recommend this text for English PhDs who are pondering employment outside academe; it will provide a much-needed overview of communication in the corporate world. A humanities-business fusion forms the basis for Barry Eckhouse’s Competitive Communication: A Rhetoric for Modern Busi-

Book Reviews : Scenarios for Technical Communication: Critical Thinking and Writing Teresa Kynell and Wendy Krieg Stone. Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1999. 296 pages

refreshing approach to business and technical workplace communication in Scenarios for Technical Communication: Critical Thinking and Writing. The authors have incorporated critical thinking skills, project research, and standard rhetorical elements into assignments for developing, producing, and writing technical and business documcnts. Their book is unusual in its presentation, taking a hybrid approach: it combines conventional business and technical writing advice with lively and interesting case studies. These cases, which the authors call &dquo;scenarios,&dquo; lead to practical exercises and assignments that emulate workplace writing situations.

Book Reviews : Technical Communication in the Global Community Deborah C. Andrews. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1998, 606 pages

IN 1997, I WROTE with some chagrin that few textbooks then available on technical communication attended to international issues and those that did placed the information in sidepieces, &dquo;appear[ing] to many students as parenthetical-and thus skippable-rather than as an essential part of the technical commun.ication that they are likely to practice in the fast-approaching twenty-first century&dquo; (Maylath, 340). Happily, with the appearance of Deborah C. Andrews’s Technical Communication in the .

Trustworthy Insurance: Information Timing and Telling the Truth

Trustworthy INSURANCE COMPANY is the secondRUSTWORTHY largest employer in Ferndale, a Chicago suburb of ioo,ooo residents. Trustworthy has a strong midwestern client base; however, five years ago, the company’s business began to fall off and profits declined. Two years ago, Carl Peters was brought in as CEO to turn the company around. Carl, who came from Los Angeles with thirty years experience in the insurance industry, envisioned a leaner company with a