Oh, for goodness' sake. What the author of that article doesn't seem to realise is that the time a professor has available to spend on teaching or marking is limited. If I spend more of my limited time on teaching or criticising my students' writing, I will have to spend less of it on teaching and criticising other things, like, you know, the stuff the students have enrolled on my course to learn... Even if I had more time per student to spend, writing wouldn't be in the top three most valuable things I could spend it on. Perhaps the situation would be different if I taught in the humanities, but I doubt it.
Writing is one of the two most important skills a student can learn. The other one is reading. Once someone gets both of these skills down, he can go a long way. Good writing is a sign of an organized mind. Bad writing is a sign of a disorganized mind. If students can't write, they can't make their points known, can't convince anyone of an idea they have, and generally will have trouble advancing in a job that requires anything beyond rudimentary communication skills.
Teaching students how to write is the primary purview of English teachers and professors, but that doesn't mean that everyone else gets a pass (and you seem to have written that even the English profs don't need to teach writing because it's not important).
If someone has to write prose for your class, you have a duty to make meaningful corrections. Otherwise, you're just assigning busy work. From what you've written here and what I've seen/read, no one wants to seem to teach anyone how to write because they're too busy teaching other "important" things. Seriously? Are the students just supposed to figure it out? And teachers wonder why they get criticized?
Respectfully, your answer came across as a bit petulant and as excusing all teachers and professors who don't want to teach students how to write.
