[Leica] Writing (was: writing going downhill etc)

[reid at mejac.palo-alto.ca.us (Brian Reid)]

>> we engineers are notorious for bad writing skills.
>
> One of the appealing features of the engineering curriculum at my school 
> was a notable lack of coursework that required writing papers.

In the 1980s I was a professor of electrical engineering at Stanford.
One time I assigned a term paper in an upper-level undergraduate class. I 
take writing seriously; I believe that the ability to communicate a design 
is as important as the ability to create it in the first place.

The students were, in general, outraged. One student filed a formal 
grievance with the university's ombudsman, claiming that it was unfair to 
require an engineering student to write a term paper. Although I won the 
case, I did have to spend a non-zero amount of time defending myself. It 
didn't hurt that the ombudsman's own field was cultural anthropology.