Originally Posted by Dude
Originally Posted by DAD22
If I recall correctly, the technical writing course I took was in the school of engineering, not the arts. If you mean to imply that a liberal arts education has a monopoly on teaching effective communication, I think you're mistaken.

I don't mean to imply any such thing.

However, there's a difference in quality. One person can attend a fine culinary institute, and another can attend Burger U, and both can say with 100% truth, "I learned to cook." Yet they're not really saying the same thing.

I mentioned earlier that I took a lot of humanities courses as an undergrad. Looking back on those years, I estimate that I wrote at least 400 typed pages as part of my coursework. This total does NOT include the lab reports I wrote for my science minor. In later years, all that practice meant that writing my M.Sc. and Ph.D. theses was fun and easy.

I understand that a tech writing course can teach some important skills, but it simply won't teach a person how to write the way it's learned by writing a hundred or more essays. The latter approach teaches how to analyze an argument, how to craft a counter-argument, how to make your main points, and how to put it all in order. The English professors at my (liberal arts) college tore our papers apart and made us keep rewriting them until they were good. They picked on everything: grammar, spelling, style, you name it.

I've worked as a tech writer. I get paid a lot because I'm very, very good and because I can get the job done very quickly. None of the other writers I've worked with seem to have as solid a grasp of writing as I do (which was presumably why they earned half what I did). These people are intelligent people, but they just don't have the mental discipline that I've developed in this area. Obviously, I can't say why, but on my end, I know that my education was a major contributor to my current skill level.

I'm not saying that everyone should write a hundred essays (20-25 might be good). But I do think that the gen. ed. courses offered today are often too heavy on multiple choice tests and too light on rigorous evaluation of each student's essays.