Reply #61: As a graduate student in an English department,

[MineralMan]

I got assigned to teach a class all the other staff hated, "English for non-majors." Since it was mainly an engineering school, engineering majors made up most of the students in the class. I was my first teaching assignment, and I had little direction about how to proceed.

So, on the first day of class, I had the class write a short essay in class describing the past four hours of their lives. The goal was for me to get some idea of their writing skills. That evening, I read the essays. Horrible, with a couple of exceptions. Almost incoherent in many cases.

At the next class session, I gave a lecture about the value of writing decently. The key point in the lecture was that communication in writing was the difference between a career doing the same type of work as the day you started working and becoming a project engineer, supervising a group, or even better. That caught their attention. The rest of the semester, I led them, step-by-step through the process of creating coherent short documents. Most did pretty well by the end of the semester.

Sometimes, it's just a matter of understanding why you have to learn something.