I had been very disappointed through the recent news article “Students, faculty question role of College Writing within Core Curriculum ” for neglecting to range from the outlook during any engineering students. As the article begins, “The very first-year writing course, that is needed for those CC and SEAS students,” the only real interviews pointed out within the article were with a number of Columbia University students. This will cause the content to become ridiculously biased towards the requirements of CC students and also to ignore all of those other students who need to take UWriting.

One good reason UWriting is recognized as unnecessary through the students interviewed within the article happens because it covers similar skills to Literature Humanities and Contemporary Civilization. Bad these aren’t classes SEAS students are needed to consider! Actually, UWriting may be the only essay-based class engineers have to take to be able to graduate. Removing UWriting would remove our only needed chance to learn to write in a college level. This consideration is totally overlooked within the article.

Another argument this short article presents is the fact that “you’re best finding out how to write with respect to the styles in classes that you simply take instead of learning one style.” This neglects to think about that engineers don’t have classes that actually educate these to write in complete sentences, not to mention engineering essays or reports. While, yes, we might have to write a paper or two for Art of Engineering, we don’t have any coaching regarding how to really write.

Actually, the only real time I’ve learned on how to write something apart from in UWriting was at a brief history class, as we all accomplished it poorly on the papers the TA needed to intervene. All of those other classes I’ve taken happen to be much more centered on teaching what we should’re covering, instead of crafting about this.

For any “news” piece, this analysis doesn’t appear to possess a large amount of objective news inside it. I’d feel differently whether it had incorporated an over-all survey assessing the effectiveness of UWriting. I don’t begin to see the reason for writing a news article about something which doesn’t have either a celebration, like a student petition to alter the curriculum, or statistics to support it. With this particular insufficient critical reporting, how do i make sure that it is really an accurate reflection of people and not simply some debate among a really small area of the college blown from proportion by cherry-selected interviews that induce the sense that “many” individuals are in opposition to this program?

No matter my concerns using the article’s objectivity, excluding engineers out of this news report was unfair. Possibly the content’s arguments are suitable for CC studentsmaybe they don’t always “need” UWriting. But because an engineer, I absolutely did, but my peers and that i were built with a to participate this analysis.

I’ve found it very embarrassing that Spectator, a newspaper organization whose editor-in-chief is definitely an engineer, so blatantly overlooked the outlook during SEAS students as well as their requirement for a writing education.

Alexandra Della Santina

The writer is really a SEAS senior majoring in electrical engineering. She’s the present poet laureate from the Columbia College Marching Band along with a former columnist for Spectator.