Text-based interviews that compared the teacher's intention for a given comment on an engineering student's paper with the student's understanding of the comment were used to examine the extent to which students understand the comments they receive and to determine the characteristics of comments that are well understood and those that are not. The teachers' comments analyzed in this study were fully understood only about half the time. Inclusion of a reason or explicit instructions helped students understand the comments.

Many engineering undergraduates receive their first and perhaps most intensive exposure to engineering communication through writing lab reports in lab courses taught by graduate teaching assistants (TAs). Most of the TAs' teaching of writing happens through their comments on students' lab reports. Technical writing faculty need to be aware of TAs' response practices so they can build on or counteract that instruction as needed. This study examines the response practices of two TAs and the ways the practices shifted after the TAs began using a grading rubric. The analysis reveals distinct patterns in focus and mode, some reflecting best practices and some not. It also indicates encouraging changes after the TAs started using the grading rubric. The TAs' marginalia became more content focused and specific and, perhaps most important, less authoritative and more likely to reflect a coaching mode. The article concludes with implications for technical writing courses.

Previous research has indicated that engineering faculty do not follow best practices when commenting on students' technical writing. However, it is unclear whether the faculty prefer to comment in these ineffective ways, or whether they prefer more effective practices but simply do not enact them. This study adapts a well known study of response in composition to ask whether engineering faculty prefer authoritative, form-focused comments, or whether they may prefer to write different sorts of comments. We asked ten civil engineering faculty to comment on a sample paper and then rank their preferences for provided versions of comments on the same paper. One provided version emphasized comments on content, one emphasized comments on form, and one was balanced. Comparisons of the respondents' preferences and practices suggest that the engineering faculty recognize and value content-focused, non-authoritative responses, but generally do not write comments that conform to these values. We consider the implication of these findings for research on response to technical writing as well as for technical writing faculty in their own course. While recognizing the need for more research, we also discuss ways in which writing professionals, including WAC administrators and technical writing professors, can encourage engineering faculty to enact their preferences for response styles that reflect best practices.