Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!pdn!reggie
From: reggie@pdn.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <5464@pdn.nm.paradyne.com>
Date: 26 Jan 89 11:35:04 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19292@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5676@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5803@phoenix.Princeton.EDU>
Reply-To: reggie@pdn.nm.paradyne.com (George W. Leach)
Organization: Paradyne Corporation,   Largo FL
Lines: 38

In article <5803@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> dykimber@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Daniel Yaron Kimberg) writes:
>In article <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff) writes:
[some of my stuff about bias deleted]
>>of those guys that says, "In my day, we trudged through 5 feet of snow
>>to get to school, and we knew how to WRITE!"  [I'm from LA, so I certainly
>>couldn't talk about the snow stuff. :-) ]  
>
>Okay, sorry, didn't mean to do that.

     Really?  My father often told me how he walked through 5 feet of snow,
for two miles, uphill, both ways :-)

>>In fact, if you go back to my original postings, you'll see that I really
>>was implicitly putting the blame on the FACULTY, for not adequately warning 
>>the students about the need for good verbal skills.

>I'm more or less up in the air about this, but I think that the real
>problem isn't with students or faculty, it's with something else, which
>I don't really want to call "society", but for which I can't think of a better
>term.  I'd suspect that many if not all students, including myself, are
>students for reasons other than education, although education may be one of
>the reasons, even the top reason, for some.

    Ain't that the truth.  Most undergrads don't really have a clear vision
of what they want to do, let alone how to get the appropriate education to
prepare to do it!  Often a couse such as technical writing in an engineering
curriculum may be overlooked and considered not important.  The skills that
are taught in such a course need to be stressed and reinforced in future
courses that involve writing papers, reports, documentation, etc......




-- 
George W. Leach					Paradyne Corporation
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Phone: (813) 530-2376				P.O. Box 2826
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