"Nerds Write!": First-Year Writing Course for Engineering Students at the University of Hartford

To meet the engineering and technology challenges of the 21st century, engineers and technologists of the future, in addition to technical skills, need to master the significant interpretive, rhetorical, and analytical skills required to communicate effectively.But how can that happen, in a university's first-year, general-education, required writing course, particularly when many first-year engineering students would rather be somewhere else-anywhere else?In this paper, we describe a recent approach to teaching writing to first-year engineering students at the University of Hartford, in which we crafted a course based the concept of the nerd, a topic that engineering students find engaging, and then developing their writing skills from those materials in an integrated way that is interesting to students and (most important) develops key communication skills.We developed two tracks, one using a gender approach and the other using historical reactions to innovations in technology; these are described, along with texts used and writing assignments that grew from the readings.This rhetorical foundation becomes the basis for the oral and written communication skills required by ABET as well as essential for students' future success in the workplace.