this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2023
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I agree that these things should be taught in high school but they aren’t really one-and-done lessons - they are honed skills that take need to be practiced and refined. Gen ed courses really help with that more than stem, because as you said, stem classes require precise technical skills and profs likely aren’t going to spend precious teaching time in critical thinking, reading comprehension, or communication skills if they need to teach you Newtonian physics or biochemistry or something.
I went to a college with a strong engineering program. Presumably students would have to have done well in high school and on SATs to get in. Engineers treated college as a job prep program and were pretty blatantly put off by doing any gen ed coursework. So many companies and firms complained to the college about the graduates’ poor writing and communication skills that they had to institute a writing exit exam to graduate with a bachelors. All you had to do was write a 4/5 paragraph essay to some generic prompt - the exact sort of thing you do for SAT or AP exams. The pass rate was ~25% for graduating engineers! This was a few decades ago now, I imagine as ai gets more commonly used for writing assignments this issue will worsen… Or fundamentally change how critical thinking works in a way that I can’t foresee.
Frankly the amount of writing encouraged where I worked for over 20 years was minimal. It was mostly PowerPoints and emails that you had to get all the substance into the first paragraph. The major writing I ever did was for stuff the was going into patents and that is a very different kind of writing. Not sure liberal arts or college writing would help with either if those.
I do admit though some people's writing is terrible. I remember reading nominations for an employee reward. People's writing skills varied widely. Some were really terrible.
As for me, we had a writing requirement in college that was integrated with lab reports. The English prof too one look at my reports and said taking their class was a waste of time. So basically I tested out.
I think it depends where you end up for your career and how good at writing you are. Sounds like you were already proficient. A lot of people aren’t! I am in a research role now where manuscripts, PowerPoint, and posters are my main deliverables, so writing and figure design is quite important. I work with a lot of younger folks and they really struggle with organizing their arguments through writing and visual design. Practice helps, but at base I think it’s a critical thinking issue. They aren’t dumb, they just know the conclusion but don’t know how to step their audience through from a beginning to an end in a logical and engaging way.
I had to take a technical writing class at one point (memos, patents, manuals, etc) and yea that’s a totally different type of writing that probably won’t help with emails and PowerPoints! I don’t think I’ve ever “used it” but it was eye opening and I have a lot of respect for people who can do that well. I guess (to pull in what you said earlier) this type of writing is just critical thinking for technical exactness where I think the type of communication I do in my job, and what I assume a lot of day to day communication other stem people do either internally or for the public, is more rhetoric through storytelling, which is where I think the gen ed classes really help.
Yes, I think role depends. I did a lot more real writing in graduate school. Papers, thesis, etc. As far as writing ... this relates a lot to critical thinking. If you cannot write a good technical paper or article it may be a critical thinking problem. There is also a difference between being given the answer or solution method from books or papers and working it out yourself.
My wife taught science at the community college level. Thing she said was a lot of students did not understand critical thinking and how to think through things. She felt real accomplishment when half way through the semester she could start to see some students understanding. Same thing with a lot of the general public. Lot of people think science is an opinion not a fact. For that matter many think that there is no difference in objective fact and opinion.