Recently at a campus-wide workshop an instructor of English shared the difficulty of teaching writing to freshman non-majors. Her students do not take the course seriously because they do not consider writing important for their disciplines. Architecture was listed at the top of the disciplines whose students fail to see the need of writing well.

At the College of Architecture the faculty members all know the importance of writing: it is not only a necessary professional skill for communicating with builders and clients, but writing also helps to be creative and critical in design thinking. An undeniable and painful fact is however that each year we go through one-page descriptions of the students' graduation projects, which are full of spelling and grammatical mistakes, stylistic shortcomings, as well as unwarranted claims.

Prof. Chris Ford, Prof. Ted Ertl, Prof. Camilla Rice, Prof. Rumiko Handa, and Prof. Mark Hinchman

Image courtesy UNL Communications © 2009