Tips for Writing Tutors

The STEM fields including engineering require concise, well organized, and direct writing. Unlike English writing that depends on narrative writing and quotations for support, engineering writing focuses on documenting sources and presenting data in tables, graphs, etc.  When working with engineering students here are some things to check for (in order of importance):

• Citations are correctly used and formatted and that information is summarized rather than quoted
• Figures (graphs, charts, etc) and tables are meaningful, have captions, and are labeled
• Abstract follows a structure of introductory sentence, a methods sentence, 2-3 sentences of key data points and a conclusion sentence on the overall result
• The results section includes a table or chart and the discussion section is meaningful and correlates with results