Whoops - I just sabotaged my own complaint here, by not doing a final proofreading. Here's the CORRECTED version, with my own typos fixed! I wonder if there's a way to delete the first posting...


I'm mentoring a new trainee at work, and one aspect of our job involves writing 1-2 page analyses of another component's work, for quality control purposes.

She told me she has a master's degree in psychology. However, her writing skills seem to be barely past the high school level.

There are problems with spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. More importantly, she doesn't seem to be able to write a coherent report, in terms of the overall content. She just presents a list of facts from the file she's reviewing, and then presents a conclusion which doesn't particularly follow from these facts.

When we actually discuss the work and the issues involved in these cases, she's very good at analyzing the cases. She also is a hard worker with a good attitude. Her main problem seems to be expressing herself in writing.

I've been working with her, and seen some improvement, but it's slow going. Since she's working hard, and is very proud of her graduate degree, I'm feeling rather guilty about having to correct her reports, and I can tell she's not happy about it, although she tries to be polite when I correct her. However, we need to send these reports out to two other components, one that needs to take action based on the reports, and another that reviews the quality of our work. So I feel I can't just leave them be.

A fellow mentor is facing a similar situation with the trainee that she is mentoring, who also has a master's degree. Both of these trainees are much younger than we are, and we are wondering whether the U.S. education system is to blame. It's just hard to believe that someone could have gotten to the point of obtaining a graduate degree in a field that requires research and writing, and never learned to write along the way.