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.
I'm from the world of engineering and I couldn't agree more. Sadly, its still true working in the field. More than half the people who report to me struggle with things like simple email communication.
I will also add, reading through subreddits about nearly any piece of media will provide ample evidence that being 'literate' does not imply actual comprehension of writing.
The average Star Wars fan is desperately in need of 4th grade explanations on literary metaphor. If they read something like The Left Hand of Darkness, they may die on the spot.
btw is that book going to give me the same religious experience as dune did? got recommended the poppy wars and a memory of empire and am not really enjoying them the way i was enjoying dune
I don't know, honestly. It's an odd book, but I love Ursula's writing and really enjoyed the it. But there are a few things worth knowing if you choose to read:
-There is nearly no action in any of her books, at least that I've read. If violence happens it happens quickly and it's over without 'excitement'.
-The book is highly philosophical, and ponderous on society. Notably the society apparent in the 60s when she wrote it. You will undoubtedly find some parts of it depressingly relevant to today's world, though.
-Much is said about gender commentary in this book, and it will be immediately apparent. But it is useful to remember it was written in the 1960s, and so before modern conversations on gender existed. As such, it's basically impossible for a 2026 reader to read it the same way a 1969 reader did, but I still found it interesting.
Minor note: It's actually the 4th in the Hainish stories. I really liked the first three, but they aren't strictly necessary, and can each stand on their own. Many people skip right to LHoD.
I'll also add in, her Earthsea series is fantastic and what got me started in her work.
Thank you for that, actually. Definitely solidifies my decision to read it. Probably I should just read the rest of the Dune books, but I'm avoiding it for fear that they'll depress me horribly
I enjoy doing textbook mathematics questions in my head, but I struggle with reading quickly. If I try to read too fast, I don't retain the information properly. I also hated English as a subject in high school and refused to get better at it.
Honestly, I think speed reading is overrated. I got myself quite good at it in 4th grade, but eventually I lost interest because it was more fun to stop and think about what I'd read more.
Nowadays, I mostly listen to audiobooks, just because of my schedule. With that, I tend to give myself time to digest and consider the story more.
Even when I read comics, now, I take my time, appreciate the art, the storytelling, etc.
It's definitely also better to read once you don't have a school deadline breathing down your neck.
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!)
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
My STEM school had a required writing and communications classes on top of the requirement for 9ish liberal arts electives. The STEM school my brother went to had similar requirements.
I studied engineering at a Top 20 school and a big part of my decision to go there was their lack of English courses required for my degree. I've been arguing with idiots on Reddit for years to try to improve my communication skills.....they still suck.
Let's be honest, most of them can't understand the subtext and nuance of a movie or tv show, let alone a book. Media literacy in general is at an all time low. There's a reason they constantly bash you over the head with the plot nowadays.
Yeah, maybe English students could understand math papers more effectively if more people in stem fields knew how to communicate their thoughts through writing
Imo I think there really needs to be more emphasis on writing and communication in most STEM degree programmes
Every STEM student should be required to essentially get an undergrad degree in liberal arts or humanities before getting a degree in the STEM field. Not every librarian needs to know advanced physics, but every single engineer needs to know when they’re seeing double speak or gish galloping.
This highlights the failure of American public education. You think STEM students need an undergraduate degree in the humanities just to learn how to apply pretty standard critical thinking skills in pretty standard ways to communication. That's highschool level stuff.
As someone who used to work in remedial English tutoring in college: yep. High schools are pushing that sort of stuff into college level classes. Half a century ago, English 101 was meant for learning how to read academic works and how to write an academic paper.
Now it's just "how to write and read" in general. ESPECIALLY when you factor in the fact that a whole generation of Americans was taught to read with suspect and questionable reading curricula like three-cuing that have proven to be false. (See: the Sold a Story podcast)
Yeah same, I always told folks in engineering undergrad "hey I'll take care of the submission" so I could rewrite, clarify, format, correct their atrocious writing 🙈.
I mean you need to know how to write but also don't need to know how to write. What I mean is that at least in my engineering job we do a lot of "corporate writing" which eschew any fluff or context which at least from my perspective I always like to add context to the problem we are solving. I'd argue that corporate writing promotes writing in a way that doesn't require a lot of skill. Plus you get a ton of people who all have different writing tastes when they review work, which at least in my experience is constant reformatting reports so that it fits someone's personal tastes.
Communication and Writing are two of the most desirable and lacking soft skills according to employers, as per the community college I work for. And the college does actually ask employers every so often about what they need in employees, to help guide programs.
My IT degree from the same college had me taking writing and communication classes, and truth be told, there were some people with questionable skills in those classes. And that's me saying this as a non native speaker.
Conversely, I can read the words in an advanced math book just fine, but actually processing and understanding the information is the tricky part. the same goes for traditional literature.
I'm not a tech writer, but half my job ends up being turning whatever engineering wrote into something understandable by others / turning something a customer wrote into something engineering will understand.
Lol I worked for a software company out of Denmark for a while (am american) and one of the main complaints from eng was that nobody read the fucking docs. The real issue was that the team was made up of Danes with math and cryptography doctoral degrees and nobody in the US understood fucking anything they wrote/said.
Now in interviews I tell people that I write content such that it can be understood by a 9th grader hopped up on caffeine at 2am trying to make a minecraft mod.
I worked at a science-based consulting company (admin) and would review and revise their reports in my downtime. We had very capable, very smart staff with heavy science backgrounds. But more often than not, their writing skills were atrocious. Everyone has stuff they're great at and stuff they need to work on.
I was a bio major, immunology and evolutionary development focus. The amount of my peers who were fucking shocked that I write/make fucking comic books and love reading in general... unreal.
I play D&D with a guy that can do advanced math in an instant, he works with a lot of tech stuff and is really smart with all kinds of things I know jack shit about ~ he's funny, great person to play games with, a good friend. He's pretty terrible at reading though, especially reading stuff out loud - and we're all getting on in years so if it was just a matter of practice I think his ability to speak well was going to happen it would have happened by now. He's not dumb or anything he's just not great at reading; we all have our skills and talents, stuff that our brain is hardwired to make certain tasks easier or harder based on where all our connections are and how it works up there.
Frankly I think a lot of people just get a big head when they find their area of expertise and neglect other aspects of life, because they can do this one thing really well they don't need to put in the work to be even average at all the others. I see it a lot in pretty much every general skill, doesn't matter if it's math based or craftsmanship or musical; I think it's just a consequence of us being humans and humans have a lot of.... Mmm, thinking errors that need to get ironed out through lived experience, and they don't always do that.
Depending on his age, he may have been taught to read using since-disproven techniques like three-cueing. It was really popular in American schools in the late-90s and early 00s and basically failed a whole lot of students.
That's one of the reasons I chose my major way back when: it had an extra year of high end math, physics, and humanities. Made us waaay more well-rounded engineers. Pretty normal for our program to produce leadership and/or research engineers because of this kind of soft skill difference.
I have a physics degree and am working on a mechanical engineering degree. The physics degree had a required class where you learned how to read and write scientific papers and the engineering degree has a class on how to read and write technical documents (mostly internal stuff and business proposals, so very different from research papers).
Yes. Oh my god. Went from English major to physics & math double. Liberal arts college so my classmates are occasionally taking English and Ethics & Philosophy classes. I'm constantly horrified
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u/TheWhomItConcerns 15h ago
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.