I spent about four hours today grading lab reports, and I noticed a rather alarming trend amongst the reports: many of them, though typed, were full of misspelled words (in my book, if you typed it in a word processor with spell checker, a single misspelled word is too much) and grammatical errors. I’m not talking about the grammatical errors mentioned in passing in Strunk and White; I mean run-on sentences five lines long that cannot even be bothered with a comma splice. Sentences without any really definite subject. Nouns and verbs slapped together with no regard for their meaning.

The trouble doesn’t end with the unbelievably difficult to read “style” of writing. There was at least one tautology per report (many had multiple), and frequently people were guilty of petitio principii. “The blue car is blue. Blue cars are superior. Sedans are nice, but blue sedans are superior. Therefore blue cars are superior.” That sentence makes about as much sense, and contains about as much content, as most of the answers given to questions in lab reports. Even the ones that didn’t curl back onto themselves like a handicapped snake intrigued by its own tail contained entirely too much verbage. Is it so difficult to ask people to be succinct in their writing?

Just what exactly are they teaching in high schools these days? When I was there, we read William Strunk and E.B. White’s The Elements of Style. Yes it was dry, yes it was boring, but it made your writing better. I know the difference between “nauseous” and “nauseated”. I know that when I say “I feel nauseous” I am condemning myself quite harshly. I like to pretend that my technical writing is direct. Taking some long, rambling path in which you define concepts that should be known to the reader is not just frustrating to read, it reflects poorly on the author.

Repetitive sentence structure indicates to many readers, myself included, that you have nothing interesting to say. Clearly, when you write something that sounds like:

“We hooked the electrodes to the plate. We used the voltmeter to measure potential differences. We plotted the potential differences. We then changed sheets.”

you aren’t terribly interested in what you’re trying to say. Perhaps you could try something like:

“For each of three acetate sheets, we connected electrodes to the conductive circuits. We then used a voltmeter to measure the potential differences and plot them on a copy of the acetate sheets.”

I just said the exact same thing, and it was only slightly more verbose, but at the same time it’s much more interesting to read.

Another common trend I noticed was defining terms that did not need defining. If your audience is a graduate teaching assistant for a physics course, you can probably bet that he understands that “tangential” and “parallel” in this context have the same meaning. You need not bore us with the details of how they are related, taking two sentences that can be stricken from the paper with no loss of content.

Efficient writing seems to be a lost art amongst these freshmen. I’m not sure how high school let them loose without the ability to write a simple expository piece without mucking it up, but shame on them. Shame on the parents that brow-beat the schools into lowering their standards so that little Sally or Dave could get into college and not have her/his feelings hurt. If you cannot convey a thought clearly given three days to write about it, you have no business carrying around a college degree. They’re going to get one, though, and that devalues every other student’s. After about five years, nobody’s going to care what your GPA was, what you did in your English 101 classes, or what your physics TA thought of your writing abilities. They’re going to see that you came from such and such a school, and based on those they saw before, they will judge you. From what I’ve seen so far, they probably won’t like what they’ve seen.

If you would like to learn more about writing properly, I recommend that you pick up a copy of The Elements of Style and keep it on your desk. It may make you look less like a dunce in the eyes of your all-important superiors.