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Subject:Re: Seeking advice on English MA From:Christine -dot- Anameier -at- seagate -dot- com To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 19 Apr 2001 14:38:15 -0500
Elna Tymes wrote: "That's why I tend to look for folks who *finished* the
degree and thesis - they had to learn something about clear writing in the
process of doing the thesis."
I have to disagree with this on two points:
(1) A master's thesis is a completely different animal from the kind of
writing I do today. If I write an excellent 25, 50, 100-page essay on
subversion of hegemony in the lesser-known works of Cuthbert Queeg, that
doesn't mean I can write a good six-step procedure on how to modify a
database record. In school I wrote longish text-only things and I'd never
heard of bullet points. Now everything I do is bulleted, numbered, and/or
studded with screen captures.
(2) In my experience, clarity is not universally encouraged in
graduate-level writing. I occasionally had professors marking my papers
down because they were TOO clear: any line of reasoning that didn't require
serious head-scratching looked facile and superficial to them. Two
professors marked my master's exam (essay exam; yes, we have no master's
thesis). One of them felt the essays were clear, concise, and lively. The
other clearly felt that the essays were not sufficiently formal,
convoluted, and dry.
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