To my friends who are English/Composition teachers
Subtitle: Writing Skills are Not Optional
Physical chemistry labs often take a long time to complete. Sometimes, there are several weeks of data collection, followed by a two-week gap to write up your lab report. So, it is sometimes the middle of February before I see anything my students have actually written, given that the majority of other tests and quizzes I give are problems that require numerical (not written) answers.
The majority of the writing I see is really bad. The fact that I know that it's bad is an indication of how bad it really is, since I'm by no means the best writer in the world. When I return my first set of lab reports for the semester, I give the students some version of the following little talk......
"Some of you did very well on this experiment. Some of you did not. However, the majority of you did not explain your conclusions sufficently well in your report that I could tell the difference. I know that most of you think that writing skills don't matter because you're an engineer. That's not true. Writing skills are not optional, people. If you perform experiments or tests and come to conclusions, you have to be able to make an argument explaining why you support those conclusions. And you have to be able to do this in writing. That's what a journal paper is. That's what a conference paper is. That's what a quarterly report to your project mananger is.
Unfortunately, I can't teach you how to do this. I don't have time to, but what's more is that I don't know how to. It's not what I'm trained to do. Fortunately for you, there are people who do this. In fact, they have a whole class about it. It's called English Composition, and when you took it you probably skipped class a lot because you thought you were smarter than your teacher, who was some leftover hippie weirdo that always wanted to talk about literature. I admit, I don't know why those people talk about literature so much either. I don't know what T.S. Eliot was trying to say and why that J. Alfred Pufrock guy can't decide if he wants to eat the peach or not. But there are probably a lot of things I do that they don't understand either, so we'll just call it a draw.
But they can teach you how to write. Which, to reveiw, I can not. And, to reveiw again, writing skills are not optional. If your writing skills are not up to par, you need to address this. There are resources available to help you, many of them facilitated by those leftover hippies who like literature too much. Avail yourself to them. I mean it."
Physical chemistry labs often take a long time to complete. Sometimes, there are several weeks of data collection, followed by a two-week gap to write up your lab report. So, it is sometimes the middle of February before I see anything my students have actually written, given that the majority of other tests and quizzes I give are problems that require numerical (not written) answers.
The majority of the writing I see is really bad. The fact that I know that it's bad is an indication of how bad it really is, since I'm by no means the best writer in the world. When I return my first set of lab reports for the semester, I give the students some version of the following little talk......
"Some of you did very well on this experiment. Some of you did not. However, the majority of you did not explain your conclusions sufficently well in your report that I could tell the difference. I know that most of you think that writing skills don't matter because you're an engineer. That's not true. Writing skills are not optional, people. If you perform experiments or tests and come to conclusions, you have to be able to make an argument explaining why you support those conclusions. And you have to be able to do this in writing. That's what a journal paper is. That's what a conference paper is. That's what a quarterly report to your project mananger is.
Unfortunately, I can't teach you how to do this. I don't have time to, but what's more is that I don't know how to. It's not what I'm trained to do. Fortunately for you, there are people who do this. In fact, they have a whole class about it. It's called English Composition, and when you took it you probably skipped class a lot because you thought you were smarter than your teacher, who was some leftover hippie weirdo that always wanted to talk about literature. I admit, I don't know why those people talk about literature so much either. I don't know what T.S. Eliot was trying to say and why that J. Alfred Pufrock guy can't decide if he wants to eat the peach or not. But there are probably a lot of things I do that they don't understand either, so we'll just call it a draw.
But they can teach you how to write. Which, to reveiw, I can not. And, to reveiw again, writing skills are not optional. If your writing skills are not up to par, you need to address this. There are resources available to help you, many of them facilitated by those leftover hippies who like literature too much. Avail yourself to them. I mean it."