[HarryHirsch]

Writing 1+ page essays and MLA citation formatting is work that seems to only exist in academia.

Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace. Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?

I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum. Granted, much of high school and regional college is piss-poor, but instead of writing off all of university as useless one should demand proper performance.

[BeetleB]

> Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace.

I'm getting deja vu:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23496234

Seems the experience is very different in differing work places.

> Doesn't everyone dread getting muddled, poorly formatted emails because you have to guess the meaning or write back and forth several times to find out what's going on?

This is the norm at my (very successful and large) company.

> I don't get the pervasive hostility to education and academia in this forum.

I'm very pro-education, but I will point out that all the people I know who write very poorly have formal education, and often graduate degrees. Culture will dictate how well you write much, much more than education. If the work culture doesn't value it, people will write poorly.

[jdhn]

>Proper written communication and literature searching skills are demanded everywhere in the workplace.

Proper written communication, absolutely. However, you can argue that people don't need 4 years of writing essays in order to comprise emails or PowerPoints. As for literature searching, what does that mean in a normal office environment context?

[HarryHirsch]

My students have to write lab protocols. In General Chemistry class they were filling in worksheets (seriously, are they paying tuition to fill in worksheets?), now they get to write 8 - 10 pages for each organic lab about the context, what they did and what is all means. The initial attempts are universally lousy, but they do improve. One hopes that the improved writing skills carry over to other kinds of written communication. It's just sad that expectations in the first semesters are set so low, it's really a tyranny of low expectation.

Footnoting means to put stuff into proper context. Of course you need literature searching skills to put stuff into proper context, and you need to know where to find documentation for your field of work.