Article co-authored by Stevens professor and student garners nationwide attention from business, academia
HOBOKEN, N.J. - An opinion editorial co-written by a professor and a student at Stevens Institute of Technology has been cited by several academic departments around the country and by at least one business consulting group.
The article, titled "The Lost Art of Writing," laments the decline in writing skills among young Americans and the scarcity of good English-prose training, with a focus on engineering and technology universities. Written by Professor Silvio Laccetti, of the Stevens Department of Humanities, and by his student Scott Molski, a senior in the Stevens Business and Technology program, the op-ed was released via Knight-Ridder Tribune newswires in July and was picked up by as many as 50 newspapers nationwide, including The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
"The computer is the worst offender," the authors contend in the essay. "College and high school students sit at their machines e-mailing and instant messaging without proofreading, revising or giving much thought to what they have written. The errors then continue to be circulated and repeated by others until finally everyone on the Internet has become illiterate, replacing proper English with Internet slang. Unfortunately for these students, their bosses will not 'lol' when they read a report that lacks proper punctuation and grammar, has numerous misspellings, various made-up words, and silly acronyms."
So far, the piece has appeared on websites as diverse as the Library Planet.com news bulletin board and the American Library Association's "summer reading" web pages.
In September, a further use of the op-ed became apparent on websites: It began to be used as an essay included in course materials for college English composition and writing classes, specifically at East Kentucky University and the University of Kennesaw in Georgia. In the Kentucky instance, Dr. Andrew Harnack assigned his Composition I students their first essay of the semester by instructing them to "read Silvio Laccetti and Scott Molski, 'Cost of Poor Writing No Laughing Matter,' and then write a 300-word essay in which you describe yourself as a writer and then tell me how you intend to improve your writing."
Surprisingly, too, the piece is heavily quoted on at least one commercial website, that of Hurley TechComm, Inc., a North Carolina corporate communications training service that boasts of providing "your staff with the necessary tools to become effective, efficient communicators, which translates into saved time and money and less frustration!"
The website features citations from the essay, such as "Fact 1: Approximately 66 percent of high school seniors do not write a three-page paper as often as once a month for English class, and 75 percent never receive any writing assignment in history or social studies (Laccetti and Molski)"; and "Fact 4: The major complaint from the business world upon hiring science and engineering students is that they have deficient writing skills (Laccetti and Molski)."
"We are very proud of Scott Molski for going out there and expressing his ideas about the need to improve literacy among young collegians," said Associate Dean Louis Laucirica of Stevens' Howe School of Technology Management, who directs the undergraduate Business and Technology program. "We're also grateful to Dr. Laccetti for his encouragement of an outstanding student to make his views known nationally."
Molski has been highly active in Stevens' student organizations, and has served as the editor of the university newspaper, The Stute, for which he now acts as business manager.
Laccetti has had a long and distinguished career in the field of humanities and social sciences, with a concentration in urban studies. He is himself a prolific writer of guest opinion columns, many of which have appeared nationally, as well as in Canada and the Caribbean.
About Stevens Institute of Technology
Founded in 1870, Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the leading technological universities in the world dedicated to learning and research. Through its broad-based curricula, nurturing of creative inventiveness, and cross disciplinary research, the Institute is at the forefront of global challenges in engineering, science, and technology management. Partnerships and collaboration between, and among, business, industry, government and other universities contribute to the enriched environment of the Institute. A new model for technology commercialization in academe, known as Technogenesis®, involves external partners in launching business enterprises to create broad opportunities and shared value.
Stevens offers baccalaureates, master’s and doctoral degrees in engineering, science, computer science and management, in addition to a baccalaureate degree in the humanities and liberal arts, and in business and technology. The university has a total enrollment of 2,150 undergraduate and 3,500 graduate students, with about 250 full-time faculty. Stevens’ graduate programs have attracted international participation from China, India, Southeast Asia, Europe and Latin America. Additional information may be obtained from its web page at www.stevens.edu.
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