Re:What's the Point? (Score 2, Informative)

A class you took as a first-year college student is not going to help you much when you start working and trying to a) learn new technical stuff in a real work environment and b) communicate it to people without your expertise. Sorry, but that's the "great writing inoculation hope." It's been a hope for a long time, and it's never panned out (see David Russell's book Writing in the Academic Disciplines if you'd like a detailed history of just how long people have wished this were true, and just how much it's not). If you want to be a good writer, you'll have to keep on practicing (ie, writing) and learning how to write in and for new contexts.

For me to hear you say that engineers don't need to communicate clearly is, frankly, scary. There are some great (yes, academic) articles out there tracing just how badly things can go wrong when engineers don't communicate well. One such article is pithily titled "Communication: The missing link in the Challenger disaster." Another is called "Understanding failures in organizational discourse: The accident at Three Mile Island and the Shuttle Challenger disaster." You get the idea. Good communication is everyone's responsibility, no matter how much my engineering students wish it weren't.