Re: Seeking advice on English MA

Subject: Re: Seeking advice on English MA
From: Elna Tymes <etymes -at- lts -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 11:31:05 -0700

Scott -

> With all due respect, I disagree. When I was in grad school, I worked in the Writing Lab and as an English instructor. In both cases, I had grad students from other disciplines in my lab/class. I can't tell you how many times I encountered people who had no concept of sentence boundaries, and that's for starters. It was extremely discouraging. I was hired by another department to work with MS students on their thesis efforts. One student had to undergo 32 revisions and was finally given approval by the committee only because they wanted him out of there. (He was ex-military, I believe....)
>
> I only write this because I think your anti-English bias is wrong and your assumption that students in other disciplines with advanced degrees can automatically communicate "sufficiently" is faulty.

You can disagree with me till pigs fly. However I'm in charge of hiring (and firing) the people who will help me make my company profitable, and hence I pay attention to what has worked in the past and what hasn't. And in my experience, my slight bias stands.

If you go back and look at my original statement, I pointed out that a holder of a Master's degree had to be able to create a thesis (normally, that is - there are some disciplines that don't require one) of sufficient clarity to get it past a thesis review committee. Obviously that committee includes some folks in charge of grammar and construction and other things that contribute to clarity. Hence the student probably went through the process of rewriting said thesis to get to the desired state of clarity. This is where your experience probably came in - you were in charge of helping these naifs
make their output understandable. And of course it was discouraging for you! That's why I tend to look for folks who *finished* the degree and thesis - they had to learn something about clear writing in the process of doing the thesis.

You're wrong in your assumption that I automatically prefer students with degrees in disciplines other than English *because* of the thesis problem. Where students (especially in something technical) haven't had to do a thesis, I have required a writing sample describing a process - even if it's as little as the infamous peanut butter sandwich example - to see how they handle the language.

Elna Tymes
Los Trancos Systems


^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available 4/30/01 at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com

Sponsored by DigiPub Solutions Corp, producers of PDF 2001 Conference East,
June 4-6, Baltimore, MD. Now covering Acrobat 5. Early registration deadline
April 27. http://www.pdfconference.com.

---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit
http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.


Previous by Author: Re: advice needed: client problem
Next by Author: Re: Seeking advice on English MA
Previous by Thread: Re: RE: Seeking advice on English MA
Next by Thread: Re: Seeking advice on English MA


What this post helpful? Share it with friends and colleagues:


Sponsored Ads