The article "Joining the Engineering Community: How Do Novices Learn to Write Like Engineers?" was written by Dorothy Winsor. She from Iowa State University, where she had focused on the writing and grammar of engineers. She studied carefully people writing and believed that if you wanted to understand how writing and texts supported or mediated a activity, you just have to pay close attention to what the texts actually do in making the activity. The article touches on how people learn to write. It puts the thought out that that if people learn to write by copying someone else, thus learning how to write, when will they be able to put forth they own original work, if at all? The article starts off with her preliminary study of students who alternated in 3 month cycles of full time work and school. She studied their writing and found that it seemed like a lot of their learning and experience had come from "Sink-Or-Swim" situations. They went spoon fed through their process, instead they were giving the tools and told how to do it, then they were completely on their own.
After this, she gives some of the students comments. It seemed like the students were in favor of the models, because they were used to seeing it or something similar to it at their own work. Next, She goes over the implications of her study. She felt, although the comments and statistics were interesting, that they raise more questions than they answered. The article talks about H.M. Collings and how he feels that skill like learning cannot be taught through a strict set of rules. Instead, he believes that such knowledge is gained through contact of the expert and the novice. Basically, He's saying that if you take a person who has only read about working on cars and a person who was trained by a expert on working on cars, the person who was trained by the expert will have more skill.
After this, She ends the article. But before she does, she throws a couple of the un answered questions out there, saying that she hopes to answer them, eventually.
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