Editorial

The course was one of those one-credit “seminars” which electrical engineering students are obliged to take as upperclassmen. As a junior, one of my assignments was to evaluate a senior´s formal research paper, I looked forward to the assignment, hoping to learn about an interesting topic. However, I was shocked while reading the paper. After wading through the morass of run-on sentences, misspelled words, and dangling prepositions, I found a paper with little introduction, few salient points, and essentially no conclusion. In addition, it appeared that the author of the masterpiece only had time to “write” — “copy” would probably be more accurate — five pages of material from a grand total of two references. (The minimum length was to be ten pages.) The author also went to the trouble of printing it on standard green-bar computer paper, and then cutting it to the required size. Fortunately for the author, the standards of written communication for senior EE students were not as stringent as those in my high school; the author´s efforts for the course were rewarded with an “A”. That´s right, an “A”!