We are all aware of passive or implied claims against us. They can offend or flatter us, and are a big part of how we judge people and analyze how they perceive us. This act is an unavoidable part of human dialogue and is present in all writing, even writing that attempts to be bi-partisan or neutral such as academic writing. In this paper, I will anylize the presence and use of passive claims in the syllabus for a senior year class for mechanical engineering majors at the New Jersey Institute of Technology (NJIT), “Mechanical Systems Engineering II”. The class is an opportunity for mechanical engineering students to design and build complex machines that solve problems given to them by the professor. Even in a class as open ended as this one, assumptions and claims are made by the professor passively about what their students will be like and what they will need to do. By examining the word choice and use of rhetorical strategies, I will show how the professor of this class and writer of this syllabus passively depicts students as professional, unconcerned with the environment, and educated engineers.
Syllabi are important pieces of literature in the classroom, as they are usually the first primary formal communication from the teacher to the student about the layout, goals, and assignments of the class. Speaking from experience as a student, the moment a student begins reading one, they are trying to find out what the teacher is like. Consciously or unconsciously they are analyzing the layout, structure, word choice, and grading scheme to try and get an idea of how the professor thinks of them and expects them to behave. For example, a professor who thinks of students as lazy may put many graded small assignments in their syllabus to ensure that the students are reading the book or doing practice problems on their own. This is important for a student, as a professor who thinks of students in this light may be more strict and harder to seek help from.
There are clear attempts in the syllabus to model the design process in the class, and more specifically how that effects . Multiple times in both the syllabus and the associated assignment sheet, the professor mentions that they will be examining every aspect of the student’s project along the way, mentioning several organizational methods and documents that will be checked and graded, asking for both a design notebook to be reviewed bi-weekly and monthly status reports (Appendix I 1). The way the author is able to simply ask for a report monthly without specifying any further details shows that the professor is very confident in their student’s ability to make their own decisions about what it is important to discuss with the teacher and how to communicate their decisions and progress in the process of design and construction. This is very business-oriented, and draws many parallels to the design processes for large engineering companies. I have spoken to many mechanical engineers, and they say that the process that occurs during a big design project usually involves the engineers doing their own work with their assigned team, and giving progress reports to their managers at fixed intervals or upon request.The similarities here seem deliberate and intelligent, and function as important stepping stones to the working world. The other main grading points in the class are a design proposal, a final project summary and write up, and an oral presentation about the entire project to a group of various people, including guests and other students. These assessments stray away from normal grading in the mechanical engineering academic world, which is normally limited to tests and essays, and into the way an engineer is ‘graded’ in the real world by their employer and peers; by the quality of their work and the way in which they present both it and themselves.