> There is a drive at my school to do "writing across the curriculum." In both
> my Securities and Investments and Banking courses I assigned papers. I grade
> for content, style, presentation, grammar etc.
Consider, in some way or other speech is part of our biology -- that is speech or its forerunners must have had some Darwinian survival value. But biologically modern humans were speaking (probably very effectively) to each other for 100,000 years or so before writing appeared. I really think that writing skill should almost be considered an aberration, like perfect pitch or the ability to twitch one's ears. And in any case it is an absolute fucking outrage to measure human worth or intelligence by competence in writing, and especially by the "grammaticalness" of written work. Whatever one thinks of Chomsky's whole linguistic theory, he is certainly correct in his empirical point of departure: with the exception of those with neurological difficulties, every human being by the age of 7 or so has an essentially perfect command of his/her native language. (One almost never *hears* grammatical errors by speakers -- illusions to the contrary are based on confusing grammar with etiquette).
And if you examine a good deal of the bad writing of students closely you will find that those horrible sentences or non-sentences are *not* what the brain produced; rather they are the broken fragments of essentially perfect sentences which could not reach the written or typed page. (A member of the ISU English dept. who I only know through the department maillist backed me up on this in a cyberbrawl a year ago. It seems that she, but no one else in the department, knew of a substantial body of research --*NOT* carried out by writing teachers by by psychologists, neurologists, etc.-- that backed up the hypothesis that "writing" was in many ways more a physical than a mental skill: some almost mechanical barrier between thought and its appearance in written words.
I earned my living for most of my life by teaching writing to college students, and for over a quarter of a century I became more and more convinced that writing courses were a crime against humanity.
Carrol