Engineers are bad at English?

College Majors Engineering Majors
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<p>o O (…I want to take “creative writhing.”)</p>

<p>At any rate, from what I’ve seen, there are plenty of engineers who have terrible grammar, and terrible spelling, and can’t craft a thought out of a dictionary filled to the brim with words to choose from. </p>

<p>Unfortunately, the same goes for people in other fields, too. My husband used to have his music students write essays on their exams, and a good number of the students didn’t even make an attempt at writing anything. The ones who <em>did</em> write something wrote probably three sentences, only vaguely related to the stated question. I’ve read some material from creative writing majors that was pretty pitiful, too. Take a look at some of the novels you can buy at grocery stores-- those authors have <em>jobs</em> writing, and their sentences are rambling and barely coherent.</p>

<p>It takes all kinds to make a world. People have different strengths and weaknesses. We tend to cultivate our strengths and shy away from our weaknesses. Engineers decide to not become writers for a reason-- maybe they’re terrible at it, maybe they don’t enjoy it, maybe they like engineering better. They’ve spent a lot of time in high school concentrating on math and science, more than likely, and have probably invested more time in the engineering club than in their school’s literary magazines or newspapers. You can’t be good at everything, but I would guess that there are probably as many talented writer-engineers as there are artist-engineers, or athlete-engineers, or musician-engineers.</p>

<p>Either way, cultivating your communication skills is a good idea… Even as an engineer, you ultimately have to convey information to other people in some manner, and being able to do so in a polished and professional manner will distinguish you from the rest of the gaggle. Towards the top ranks of the field, I’m sure you’ll find a lot of verbally proficient engineers.</p>

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<p>I don’t think that the standardized test scores would account for much, given the context of this thread. The OP is talking about ‘non-top’ state universities, and - let’s face it - it’s not that hard to get into such a school. Somebody with mediocre verbal scores, but strong compensatory math scores, could probably get in. </p>

<p>I’m also not entirely sure that immigrants really would be a minority in engineering. I seem to strongly recall engineering courses that were almost completely filled with Asians. Granted, many of them were Asian-American, but of even them, many were raised in households where English was not the dominant language. I would even surmise that, in those courses, you had a better chance of being understood by the students if the prof had conducted the lectures in Chinese rather than in English.</p>