Developing Technical Writing for Engineering Students under a Paper Conference Format

This paper's objective was to share our experience in developing technical writing for Engineering students based on the cognitive process theory of writing and based on the sociocultural perspective that affirm that writing is social practices that vary depending on the contexts in which it is carried out. Since 2014 we included a new course called “Writing Technical Articles” were students have to write a six-page paper in a conference format. We believe that the conference format shows students in an active learning approach how to communicate specific ideas according to the requirements of their field of study. We have structured the technical contents based on technical writing recommendations suggested by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), a professional association that produces over 30% of the world's literature in the engineering and computer science fields, publishing approximately 200 peer-reviewed journals and magazines. Students develop skills for organizing sections and subsections, relationships among parts of an argument, and combining paragraphs with diagrams, formulas and codes very common in Engineering. Until now 630 Ingeniería de Sistemas students from Universidad de San Agustin de Arequipa has been part of the course. Our experience showed that this format gives students the scope to start the process of technical writing. As initial results, we have surveyed students about their perception of usefulness of technical writing under the conference format. The initial results showed us that more than 90% of the students are Agree and Strongly Agree about the usefulness of developing technical writing.