Darren New wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>>   Quite amazingly, this seems to be so even in academic circles. Well,
>> at least here.
> 
> Yah. And I've found most marketing people, many of whose jobs it is to 
> write, have little or no grasp of simple things like sentence construction.
> 
> It just takes lots of practice and correction. I was fortunate to go to 
> a grade school (as in, first through 12th grade) where they actually 
> hammered on you ever single week to get you to improve. You started with 
> "here's a topic, take it home, and bring back a one-page essay about it 
> next week." It ended with "take a seat, here's your topic, you have 20 
> minutes for a 2-page-with-outline essay discussing the topic."

I think much of the problem is that people don't seem to re-read their 
work much, so they never realise what rubbish they wrote the first time. 
If you're doing university assignments or projects, there's no 
requirement for iteration - you *should* hone your writing carefully, 
but most people pull all-nighters and never read it all the way through.

> I think the Ph.D. stuff (at least in the USA) is much more about 
> reading, writing, and presenting than it is about the actual field of 
> research.  Maybe places like MIT teach you more technical stuff in the 
> PhD degree than the Masters degree, but that isn't the case in any of 
> the places where I or my friends went.

This is where the honing comes in. When a PhD supervisor should be 
making you start writing at least a year before you submit, then making 
you revise your thesis almost continuously, you should bloody well end 
up better at writing than when you started out.

Also, when you write academic papers in collaboration, the other authors 
should be proofreading the whole document and giving complete feedback - 
after all, their names are on it too, so any sloppy writing on the first 
author's part reflects badly on them.

(IME at least, there's a good balance between writing and content here 
in the UK.)

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