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ABET requires that all engineering graduates are able to effectively communicate technical information; however, industry leaders often lament the technical communication skills of our engineering student graduates. Despite years of concerted effort, at a national level, the situation does not appear to be improving. In contrast, the spatial skills of engineering students are typically well above average. A significant body of research has demonstrated the link between high spatial skills and success in engineering overall. But is there a link between high spatial skills and low technical communication skills for some of our students? In other words, are the high spatial skills of engineering students negatively correlated with their technical communication skills? This paper reports on a portion of a larger study examining the relationship between technical communication and spatial skills. Data for this study was collected from 90 first-year engineering students at a large midwestern university. Students were administered two tests of spatial ability and completed phonemic and semantic fluency tasks individually while being video recorded. The focus of this paper is on the relationship between spatial skills and these two types of fluency— phonemic and semantic. Phonemic fluency is defined as how well you can put words together to form a cohesive sentence or paragraph; semantic fluency is related to the size of your vocabulary. Both types of fluency likely influence a person’s ability to effectively communicate technical information. Preliminary findings suggest a weakly positive link between spatial skills and both types of fluency, which prompts further investigation into how technical communication abilities are evaluated and informs future research in the area. Implications for engineering education based on our findings are discussed in the paper.