Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!ncis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!agate!bizet.Berkeley.EDU!matloff
From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 19 Jan 89 23:59:42 GMT
Sender: usenet@agate.BERKELEY.EDU
Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
Organization: EECS, UC Davis
Lines: 28

Daniel Kimberg quoted me and said:

>*Who* is aware of the problem?  Certainly managers in industry are painfully
>aware of it, especially on the written side.  University educators are
>vaguely aware of it.  But the *students* are not aware of it at all.  They
>would be shocked to know how much of ordinary work in the real world
>consists of communication  --  holding meetings, writing reports, 
>explaining things to others, dealing with users of the company's products,
>etc.  

*                                     Maybe you've just never met any students
*who've held full time jobs.

If you trace back the train of articles that led to the one in question,
you'll see that the discussion had already excluded the people who had
worked full-time before returning to school.

Among the other students, I certainly have observed this quite a bit myself, 
both when I was in industry and now in academia.  Of course, I am not alone
in this at all.  One often sees "Why can't Johnny write?" articles in the
engineering trade papers.

Also, the discussion certainly does not mean 100.000000% when it uses
language like, "Students do such and such ..."  I made an explicit
disclaimer to the contrary in my first posting in this discussion,
and I think that one is implied anyway.

   Norm