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Lingua.com's new Academic Writing course has just started.
I am happy to share an article written by my friend and colleague Jon Yaakov Gorr, who explains why this course is useful, analyzing the current situation in law education:
Something really weird happened to public education across the
English speaking world in the 80s and 90s. Suddenly grammar, structure
and even spelling was no longer important - there were software packages
to correct everything. People started communicating, twitter-style, in
shorthand text messages of a maximum of 640 characters, and the public
education system let them get away with it. From Alaska to Brixton to Calgary to Zeehan (and we’ll tell you in a few seconds why Zeehan is really important) functional literacy dropped, not only in the lowest deciles of the population but across all segments of the population.
Surprisingly, at least for observers in parts of the world that still take education seriously, the lack of ability to read or write functional English did not stop people from being promoted from one grade or class to the next. This lead to at least one shocking headline in the New York Post in 2013: A stunning 79.3 percent of those graduating from New York City’s government-operated-school grads into New York City colleges arrived without having mastered the basics, up from 71.4 percent in 2007.
Functional literacy in the region in Australia famous for having that dry country’s highest rainfall, the mining town of Zeehan in Tasmania, is supposedly the Australia’s highest amongst the non-indigenous population. Tasmania’s functional illiteracy climbed to above 50% for the first time in 100 years in 2013. That means more than half the population can’t read the side of a box of medicines. However, many of Zeehan’s residents complete high school and make it to university.
Doing well in school might not be enough to get you top marks in your university course. By the time you are admitted to the law or medical faculties it is expected that you will have first-class abilities in English. Our work with students over the last 15 years proves, however, that students may enter those faculties without the mastery of a sufficient level of English.
Given the need to constantly promote oneself by achieving publications, or by presenting papers at conferences, underachievers in written English are unlikely to be able to achieve a high profile in their studies. This means that they cannot compete adequately for the increasingly limited supply of entry-level graduate jobs.
Our course is designed to assist you to produce work of publication standard every time you write.
For details, leave us a note at info@lingua-com.com
