Treffer: Engineering Students Write Books for Children.

This paper describes a program in which engineering students enrolled in a technical writing course at Newark College of Engineering wrote science textbooks that were donated to the Plainfield Public Library and were read by third and fourth graders. The course emphasized the importance of considering the intended audience in technical writing. The students were given guidelines concerning science literature books for children and were encouraged to answer the following questions as they read a series of professionally written science books for children. What is the overall content of the book? What size is this book? How many pages does it contain? What kinds of sentences are used throughout the book? How does the author use figures of speech? Does the author use parallel structure? How could this book be improved? Did the author reach the audience level for which he is writing? Some of the comments these books elicited after distribution are discussed and the titles of many of the books are listed. (TS)