[Leica] Writing

[oliverbryk at iqmail.net (Oliver)]

Brian wrote:
"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."

Brian's anecdote reminded me of my own experience as a teaching assistant
(TA) in the Economics department at the American University in Washington,
DC, circa 1957 or 1958 (serving as a TA was the quid pro quo for a graduate
fellowship that augmented my GI Bill stipend.) One of the duties of a TA was
to grade the blue books, i.e., examinations or assignments by professors in
the graduate school. Wielding a red pen, I marked grammatical and spelling
errors along with errors in economic reasoning or exposition. Many of the
students protested this practice, claiming that it unfairly reduced their
grades. The complaints ceased when I demonstrated the high correlation
between poor writing and fuzzy thinking.
Oliver Bryk