Background: Graduate engineering students are required to write for academic audiences; however, very few engineering programs teach engineering academic writing, and similarly, little research has been conducted on graduate engineering student writing. Purpose/Hypothesis: The purposes of this study were to investigate the argumentation patterns…

Although engineering graduate programs rarely require academic writing courses, the indicators of merit in academic engineering, such as journal publications, successful grants, and doctoral milestones (e.g. theses, dissertations) are based in effective written argumentation and disciplinary discourse. Further, graduate student attrition averages…