I promised to publish more comments from my class of budding business writers and their preparation for same in higher ed. Here is another insightful commentary:
Question: Please discuss the changing nature of writing and how higher education should therefore prepare its students.
I think that the nature of writing has changed greatly in the past few years as the use of the internet has changed everything. Information can be found so easily, and people have attention issues because we are an age of immiediate satisfaction. This makes writing difficult because we, as students, do not want to sit and read through books for research, nor do we thoroughly search through all of the internet. We take what we need to support what we are saying. High education right now gives an assignment as followes. ” X thesis statement – 15-20 pages in length.” When in reality, our world is heading toward an age when length is not necessary because we will not be taking the time to read it. We will be taking the important facts from skimming, and moving on.
Therefore, higher education needs to prepare its students in brevity. The world is constantly changing, faster every year, we need to be able to keep up. But that also means to know basics of many more subjects. The fewer words you can get your point across strongly and successfully, the even stronger you will make your argument.
I love horses. In fact, I have a wonderful little Standardbred I rescued from a dire fate. But this post is not about horses. It is about higher education, and the perception of students relative to writing and their experiences in the hallowed halls of academe.
A little prelude first. I am one of those professors within those hallowed halls. But I work hard to keep my feet balanced in two worlds: academe, and business — specifically related to its writing and communication needs. It is my conclusion that we in higher ed do a lousy job of preparing students with the knowledge and skills they will need to successfully negotiate in this new world of digital communication. Read on for one student’s commentary. There will be more interesting student-authored entries to follow:
Student Commentary
While I do agree with Ellen’s (fictional name) response, we must teach students to explore all avenues of research, I feel as though most things that can be found in a book can be found online these days. So many books have outdated material in them, but they are still sitting on the shelves. I think the best way in which higher education can prepare its students is to teach them how to use the tools properly.
For example, because the woman from the library came in and talked to us about how to analyze a website, we now have the skills to determine the credibility. I don’t think it is as important to teach where the materials can be found, but rather how to sort through those materials.
As mentioned above, many professors do require page lengths for papers, and I have even had several that only allowed one Internet source. For the times we are in now, these requirements are ridiculous. In the business world, no matter what type of office or business it may be, no one wants to read through a long paper, when the point could have been made in the first paragraph.
Instead of teaching students to write more, higher education should be teaching them to write less, but in a more complete way. There is more learning and challenge involved in writing a shorter paper than a longer one because anyone can add useless information and unnecessary words.
Higher education needs professors to spend more time teaching the students how to write for real life situations than to meet the 20 page requirement.