| | |  | This is the Conversation Forum for The Four Main Reasons Why Scientists are Sometimes Incomprehensible
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| | | Subject: Case Studies
Posted Feb 24, 2003 by Steve K.
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 | | The U.S. Naval Academy, which trains officers for the fleet, surveyed the ship's captains some years ago regarding what areas they should emphasize. The result of the poll was to drop celestial navigation completely and add courses in effective writing. So if the electronic navigation goes out someday, at least they'll be able to write a good memo to put in the bottle.
I worked at an engineering firm once upon a time, when they decided to hire an English teacher to improve our memo writing. Using an example sentence from a science text book, she "improved" the flow of the sentence, which ended up something like, "The human body utilizes the CO2 inhaled, and exhales oxygen." when someone pointed out that the sentence was incorrect, she replied, "It's an old book."
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