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Reflection On Simkin Et Al

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COMM 105-003
Assignment #1 – Reflection on Simkin et al.’s Study

For more than the past 30 years, study after study has indicated that graduating university students in America greatly lack the necessary writing skills to flourish in the workplace. In their 2012 paper “Student perceptions of their writing skills,” Simkin et al. outlined a variety of possible explanations for these troubling findings. They, however, chose to explore two of the many possible reasons for this rising writing problem: university students may be unaware of the importance of writing skills in the workplace or may possess the misconception that they are already good writers. Demographic information, survey questions about the importance of writing, personal evaluations of writing capabilities, and three writing assessments were used to investigate these hypotheses.

Study Implementation and Findings

A survey was completed by 140 students enrolled in business courses in a western university. The study revealed that 100% of the students thought that writing skills were “very important” or “somewhat important” for their future endeavours and 96% believed that their writing abilities would influence how others perceived them. This overwhelming evidence easily rejected the first hypothesis that students may be unaware of the importance of writing skills in the workplace, as all of the participants identified these competencies as relevant to the future.

Furthermore, it was found that 96% of the
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