Communication skills are critical for a successful career in engineering. Unfortunately, many students enter engineering programs with the wrong notion that the engineering profession requires much math and science but little literacy. On the other hand, very few engineering programs can afford a separate course dedicated to technical writing within the already tight credit budget. Lab reports thus serve as an excellent tool to sharpen writing skills in engineering courses. The ‘scaffold peer review’ approach aims at cultivating technical writing skills via lab reports with significant buy-in from both the students and the instructor. Component submission, guided peer review, and revision are the three critical elements of this approach. I will present the implementation of a ‘scaffold peer review approach’ in a junior-level engineering physics lab course. Results of direct and indirect assessments show significant improvement in students’ technical writing skills using this pedagogical approach.