Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.
Most universities don’t formally train their STEM students in technical writing. At the graduate level, one is basically at the mercy of one’s advisor’s taste, for better or (usually) for worse.
The first thing that my PhD advisor did, when I first met him as a foreign student, was to give me this book: https://archive.org/details/technicalwriting0000huck. And I am forever grateful for it.
Having tutored CS undergrads on writing, the lack of training (or care, or perceived relevance) was painfully obvious. Many were semi-literate wrt to English prose.
For the record, at UIUC we had a bunch of seminar classes (and I think a regular class?) on LaTeX and technical document creation, ran by A.J. Hildebrand; it was a fantastic course and I learned a lot of folklore "secrets" that the manuals will not tell you, as well as technical writing tips that were far from obvious.
That may be true in US universities, but in Europe students have to write technical reports in almost every course.
That’s a pretty sweeping generalization. In the European university that I went to, CS students definitely didn’t have to write anything longer than long-form exam questions until the bachelor’s thesis.
But less sweeping than the parent who generalized to "most universities". I think it was a long time since you went to university and times have changed.
That's probably true. It was definitely very unoptimal for students to not have practiced writing scientific text much if at all, and suddenly having to write twenty pages worth of it for their BSc. (More recently I did study another STEM subject for a bit and noticed that there was definitely more essay writing involved!)
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Not really for me in Poland - thesis was the only thing we had to write in a technical way.