It always shocked me how bad most people were at writing having completed a university degree. Just a simple ability to state a claim and then explain why it is true is often out of reach.
I agree -- it seems like it's easy to get a degree without being challenged in writing. I remember 3 writing teachers that challenged me, giving me mediocre/bad grades, and in retrospect I appreciate that.
But I think good writing requires a bit of empathy, and that's something that's hard to teach.
Most bad technical writing I see fails to define the terms it uses (or uses them sloppily). That's a failure of empathy -- I know this word so I assume everyone else does. I know what I mean by "design" so I assume everyone else does.
Another way to phrase it is the "curse of knowledge". Once people have some knowledge, it's hard for them to imagine that somebody else doesn't have it. Without that imagination, you can't write about clearly.
And a lot of the times people don't believe a claim is true because of "reasoning". They believe it because they heard someone they trust say it, or it was repeated on TV or online until it stuck. (I don't claim to be exempt from that, but I can reflect on whether I have direct experience or it’s hearsay.)
As a former instructor of a composition class that was a basic requirement of the university where I taught, I'd claim that this perhaps more than anything is what distinguishes (or should) a university education from a vocation school or other certification.
(The explaining why part is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Was there no labs / project component that you needed to do lab reports or academic paper-style writeups for? I did joint Maths-Physics which was mostly theoretical and still had a fair amount of (technical) writing to do as part of my degree.
Likewise. I do grant writing for nonprofits, public agencies, and some R&D-based businesses, and I've been talking about this post: http://seliger.com/2019/04/29/how-jeff-bezos-turned-narrativ... with some clients, as it addresses another one of those Amazon-as-writing-machine essays. Reading and writing skills remain strangely underrated.
