[blahblahblah]

I agree that many programmers need to work on improving their writing skills. However, I disagree with the notion that the humanities department is suited to providing an education in the kind of writing skills CS students need. The humanities are full of fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition and the writing styles associated with those fields tolerate a level of ambiguity that is inappropriate for CS, engineering, or the physical sciences. If you really want to learn to be a great writer capable of expressing CS concepts unambiguously and concisely then a course in technical writing taught by science/engineering faculty is what you need. An even better way to improve your writing skills is to get involved in research and publish a paper in the scientific literature. The "biggest pedantic miserable fascist sonofabitch" editors you can find in the university are not in the humanities department. They're the faculty in science and engineering whose livelihood depends upon writing amazingly clear and concise documents that withstand the intense scrutiny of NSF and NIH grant review committees, journal editors, and peer reviewers who genuinely care about whether or not the experiments are described unambiguously and in sufficient detail to enable others to replicate the experimenter's results.

[hack_edu]

> The humanities are full of fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition

Perhaps its beside your point, but this is exactly what's most important about learning how to write. There's a whole lot more that you learn by exploring 'fuzzy concepts' and non-precise systems. Approaching natural language like a science or system is delusional at best. Reading and writing "amazingly clear and concise documents" is just one way of using language as a tool.

[Aga]

"Fuzzy concepts that defy precise definition" are part of everyone's daily work so its better to learn how to deal with them.

In a normal job, you won't use your skills only for writing official documents but also for writing numerous mails, info-files and participating in chats and online discussions during the day. How well these are written will have a huge impact on the receivers ability to figure out what you are after. More then often the things discussed are not scientific facts.