Well Writing Is Important A Lot Or Not?

In the midst of grading numerous student reports, I started wondering about a lot of things related to writing. First, I wonder what makes someone a good writer as opposed to a poor writer. I always thought that my ability to write (fairly) clearly was because I was a very avid reader when I was a kid. Although I still don't know a past participle from a dangling vertebrae, I can instantly read a sentence and realize that it is awkwardly worded. Rewriting a sentence to flow better has always been easy for me. But, my son who is also a very avid reader still writes and speaks using convoluted and grammatically incorrect sentences.

I am grading reports written by college students (all juniors or seniors) and I am appalled at the astonishingly poor writing on many of them. I wonder whether they realize how much writing style influences their grade. Of course, content is critical. That's a given. But even good content, when poorly communicated can dramatically affect their grade. I even explicitly told them this in class. When I am grading report after report, I can feel my frustration rise rapidly when I encounter a report that is poorly organized (jumping from topic to topic with no sense of organization), has lousy sentence structure (convoluted, grammatically incorrect sentences that I have to read three times to understand), and lacks a clear narrative. As I sense my frustration rise, I can almost feel the decrease in my inclination to give them a good grade. Folks, if you're listening, it helps a lot if you make grading easy for your profs. Try to write well so you can get your ideas across efficiently!

Finally, I wonder if this matters in the "real world." Is it just an "academic bias" I have that makes me think clear writing is so important? Perhaps in this world of sound bites, text messaging, and micro-memos, the importance of sentence construction and narrative structure is not as critical as it used to be. Perhaps it is only for school reports that these skills are important. What do you think?