Engineers communicate multimodally using written and visual communication, but there is not much theorizing on why they do so and how. This essay, therefore, examines why engineers communicate multimodally, what, in the context of representing engineering realities, are the strengths and weaknesses of written and visual communication, and how, based on an understanding of these strengths and weaknesses, one can consider using the strengths of each form of communication to address weaknesses in the other. Doing so can possibly enable one to demonstrate for engineering majors how they can, with greater effectiveness, communicate multimodally for representing well engineering realities.

While Engineering values direct communication, indirect communication produces a kind of literacy salient for engineers that direct communication may not offer in the way indirect communication does. This article emphasizes the inadequacies of overly emphasizing direct communication for Engineering majors and explains how teaching indirect communication in the form of literature has the potential to cover some of the inadequacies one can encounter if one were to overly emphasize direct communication.

One accurate measurement is worth a thousand expert opinions. —Rear Admiral Grace Hopper (qtd. in Sheehan, 2010) Nineteenth-century freshman composition instruction at Madras University, based on a classical paradigm, prepared students for writing in professional discourses. Examining this pedagogy from today's perspective raises, for the field of postcolonial theory, questions of whether the British, who offered Indians a curriculum comparable to those at important British universities, viewed Indians as inferior beings or those needing help to become modern.

During colonial times, various British Indian educational institutions and practices, including writing pedagogies at these institutions, introduced modernity to British India. This essay explains the manner in which some students internalized modernity and in their writings used modernist beliefs and premises to critique some precolonial Indian discourses.

Subject matter experts, under the influence of modernist notions of authorship, often view technical writers as mere grammar and punctuation specialists and marginalize them as their ignorant “other. ” Technical writers, on the other hand, as rhetoricians occupying a liminal space between different disciplines, can understand different disciplinary rhetorics. If subject matter experts, instead of marginalizing technical writers, would view them as liminal subjects who are knowledgeable in different disciplinary rhetorics, then technical writers, through liminal practice, may be able to use their knowledge of audience and rhetoric to improve the quality of documentation.