Abstract
Engineers spend considerable time communicating technical details to various audiences. This requires communicative competence which is linked to the underlying knowledge and skills in the engineering disciplines.
The metaphor 'holes in the cheese‘ is used to describe a particular group of reading and writing competencies which are not yet adequately developed in students, but which are expected to be in place at their educational level, and which are further characterised as follows: (a) while it is reasonable to include limited revision of prior topics or competencies in a mainstream programme, substantive interventions to address them must be extra-curricular; (b) a significant proportion of students require development in this regard; (c) they are seldom explicitly taught; (d) most engineering academics are not explicitly trained to identify or address them; (e) identifying and addressing them through traditional assessment of written work ('red ink‘) is time-consuming for academics; (f) moreover, addressing them through traditional assessment is seldom successful: while the document may have been corrected, an improvement in competence is seldom established by this method.
By way of evidence, this paper attempts to name, explain and illustrate these 'holes in the cheese‘ in terms that are sufficiently explicit and concrete so that fellow engineering academics can readily understand and relate to them. This evidence is illustrative and anecdotal, serving as a point of discussion rather than a conclusion of fact.
With regard to reading fluency and comprehension, the reading speeds of students on intake to supplementary interventions, over a three year period, have typically been below the reading speeds regarded as a lower threshold for university students when reading fiction and non-technical materials. With regard to writing, typical challenges include grammatical errors as well as structure, organisation, logic, and integration / synthesis of information from multiple sources.