I often wonder what it must be like to be a UW professor or TA who has to grade papers. Instead of one author writing on many topics for an audience of many, we have many authors writing on one topic for an audience of one. It’s got to be a real pain these days.

If an instructor has a class of 40 and the paper is about 10 pages long, she has at least 400 pages to read — or skim — through. With apathetic students — not an uncommon species at any university, in spite of everything — this might be a little bit like reading a long, boring novel that repeats itself every dozen pages or so and is badly written to boot.

As many observers have noted, most people in our generation dread, and are not very good at, writing anything of significant length. Despite the best efforts of all parties, many college essays are riddled with conventions errors, plagued by awkward sentence construction and otherwise unpleasant to read.

Being rather sick of reading papers that are a flagrant insult to the trees whose flesh they are printed upon and having many other things to do herself, our hypothetical professor drops the paper in favor of easy-to-make, easy-to-grade multiple-choice exams. Everyone’s writing just got even worse.

A less drastic alternative is the group paper, a pedagogical Frankenstein that generally produces an output that is less than the sum of its parts. It is proof that no one of us alone is as bad of a writer as four or five of us together — unless the best writer in the group rewrites the whole thing on behalf of the others. But group papers reduce the amount of writing for students and the amount of grading for instructors — making everyone happy but dumb.

Add up all this watering-down and take into account the fact that some common courses — 100-level math and chemistry, for example — don’t assign much writing for obvious reasons, and you get an institution that doesn’t demand much in the way of written expression from its students outside a few departments such as English and journalism.

If you’re a good writer, you can actually use that to differentiate yourself from most other candidates. That probably says more about us than about our potential employers. Some people, their verbal abilities further atrophied by texting and tweeting, might not be aware of this deficiency, but companies absolutely hate it when their employees can’t write a proper sentence and string it into a paragraph. Some departments in the Michael G. Foster School of Business have mandated more writing in business courses as a top-down measure after companies complained that graduates lacked sufficient writing skills.

Good writing can’t be completely taught, but it will never happen without practice. While the Foster initiative isn’t perfect, it at least tackles the problem of bad writing skills head-on by forcing students to bang out more papers. The other colleges of the university, insofar as instructional resources and subject matter allow, should attempt to do the same.

Reach columnist Russ Wung at opinion@dailyuw.com.