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From: matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff)
Newsgroups: comp.edu
Subject: Re: engineering students and verbal skills
Message-ID: <19672@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>
Date: 30 Jan 89 01:17:23 GMT
References: <19244@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <5618@phoenix.Princeton.EDU> <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU> <614@uceng.UC.EDU> <858@afit-ab.arpa>
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Reply-To: matloff@iris.ucdavis.edu (Norm Matloff)
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In article <858@afit-ab.arpa> wbralick@blackbird.afit.af.mil (William A. Bralick) writes:
>In article <614@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@uceng.UC.EDU (daniel mocsny) writes:
>>In article <19443@agate.BERKELEY.EDU>, matloff@bizet.Berkeley.EDU (Norman Matloff) writes:
*>> In my grad course last quarter, only 1 out of 15 reports
*>> was written clearly.  [In fact, I heaped SO much praise on that one student 
*>> for writing so well, that she must have been a bit puzzled.  :-) ] 

*>> 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 heartily agree with this. The entire technical community has developed
*>many bad writing habits. Since engineering schools do not teach students
*>to write, students learn to write by subconsciously adapting to the
*>style they read. That style is frequently abysmal. 

*How much of this can we attribute to publish-or-perish?

As a defender of publish-or-perish (to a reasonable degree), I would like
to dispute this.  Faculty's research ability surely would not be hurt by
insisting that their students learn to write well.  On the contrary, it
would help research, because faculty wouldn't have to spend so much time
rewriting their grad students' research papers in submission for publication.

However, I definitely agree with what you said next:

>     J. Scott Armstrong, a professor at the University of 
>     Pennsylvania's Wharton School and editor of the _Journal 
>     of Forecasting_, conducted his own analysis of academic 
>     writing and concluded that professors who wish to be 
>     published in the academic press must: "(1) _not_ pick an 
>     important problem, (2) _not_ challenge existing beliefs, 
>     (3) _not_ obtain surprising results, (4) _not_ use simple 

I recently wrote a paper in which I showed existing beliefs were
wrong.  It was accepted by a prestigious conference in its area,
and attracted a lot of attention.  Yet when I sent an expanded
version of the paper to a journal, the referee said, in essence,
"The giants of this field never noticed a problem, so therefore
you must be wrong." :-)  [The paper is still under review, by a
different referee.]

   Norm