I cannot stress the importance of paying attention in language classes in high school. Maybe the reason why your English teacher taught you about unreliable narrators is because a lot of the media around you is written by unreliable narrators posing as reliable. Maybe they gave you assignments on interpreting texts so you could draw your own conclusions about news articles. Some of you clearly thought English classes were useless in high school and now are unable to engage critically with media.
I’m a 4th year biochemistry student and the amount of STEM students I know with low language literacy is truly concerning. Why can you do calculus but not write a basic essay? How is your understanding of quantum mechanics better than your ability to make a coherent argument? How are you months away from an engineering degree without having read a book from start to finish since childhood? There is no field of study that spares you from literacy. No matter what you do, your competence in any field will only suffer by having low reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.
I can instantly tell when someone in one of my STEM classes didn’t pay attention in English class in high school because they can’t read scientific articles without feeding them through ChatGPT. You do know that if you’re a biochemistry major, you have to both write and read scientific articles, right? And that people will consider you completely incompetent if you can’t do these things?
As a scientist you NEED to be able to express your ideas in a clear, understandable manner. Your scientific papers will get dissected in every possible way for fallacies and you need to be able to defend them. You need to know introduction-evidence-conclusion structure. You need to know what fallacies are in the first place. Being a scientist who can’t read or write critically is like being an architect that can’t draw.
