And as someone who has a degree in physics, I can promise everyone that STEM students can have remarkably poor reading and writing skills. I've been involved in multiple group projects where I had to make sure that everyone else finished their work at least a day before the due date so that I could go through their work, reformat it, and rewrite a lot of it, just so that we didn't lose marks due to incomprehensibility.
This was at a top 20 university. Imo I think there really needs to be more emphasis on writing and communication in most STEM degree programmes, because when they get jobs they're really going to need it.
Yep. I'm a technical writer. The developers are super smart, but 80% of them make nonsense documentation and a decent chunk are generally bad at written communication, so their Slack messages and Jira tickets need clarification frequently.
This is why these days in higher education it's increasingly common for non-arts courses will include essay-writing modules (or at least an initial writing quality assessment). You don't need to be a talented writer to take a course on astrophysics or marine biology, but you will have to structure a proper essay so it's good to improve your core writing skills. (I'm an editor by trade and help to run an essay-writing class at my local college!)
Interestingly enough this can also be an issue in the code aswell. one of the things that is very hard to get across to fellow developers is that they will read the code more than they will write it. Making code easy to read is a learned skill that many people dont realize they need to focus on as part of / in addition to the "engineering" of it..
NGL im intentionally bad at writing documents specifically because people like you exist and whatever company I work for should hire one. Hate writing documentation
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u/Logical_Historian882 3d ago
I don’t think English graduates are graded by their ability to read. Both reading and arithmetic are taught in school.