Integrating Engineering and Technical Communications in Sophomore Electrical Engineering Projects
Technical communications skills can be successfully taught to students in engineering courses without the expenditure of large amounts of class time if realistic design projects and reports are required of them. These design projects stimulate the acquisition of problem-solving skills by students. The use of handouts providing models of sample technical reports gives students reinforcement for the development of their technical communications skills.
Rhetoric and the Engineering Approach: Three Axioms
His knowledge of rhetorical principles enables the English teacher to criticize the content as well as the form of a technical report because the report is a verbal model of an object, process, or product. This relationship between content and rhetoric means that the English teacher can base his evaluation of the written work of science and engineering students on these three axioms: Axiom I. Poor rhetoric signals poor technical knowledge. Axiom II. Poor rhetoric manifests unscientific thinking. Axiom III. Poor rhetoric demonstrates a lack of concern for engineering values.
The Bastille: A History of a Symbol of Despotism and Freedom
This book is both an analysis of the Bastille as cultural paradigm and a case study on the history of French political culture. It examines in particular the storming and subsequent fall of the Bastille in Paris on July 14, 1789 and how it came to represent the cornerstone of the French Revolution, becoming a symbol of the repression of the Old Regime. Lusebrink and Reichardt use this semiotic reading of the Bastille to reveal how historical symbols are generated; what these symbols’ functions are in the collective memory of societies; and how they are used by social, political, and ideological groups.

To facilitate the symbolic nature of the investigation, this analysis of the evolving signification of the Bastille moves from the French Revolution to the nineteenth century to contemporary history. The narrative also shifts from France to other cultural arenas, like the modern European colonial sphere, where the overthrow of the Bastille acquired radical new signification in the decolonization period of the 1940s and 1950s. The Bastille demonstrates the potency of the interdisciplinary historical research that has characterized the end of this century, combining quantitative and qualitative approaches, and taking its methodological tools from history, sociology, linguistics, and cultural and literary studies.