This class will teach you that service is valuable and I hope to persuade some of you to take on positions of public leadership. Short of that, I want to make you aware of your responsibilities, as citizens, to participate in public life. The four such skills I will emphasize here are writing skills, analytical skills, team skills and experiential or vocational skills. Whatever you do in life, strong, clear and grammatically-correct writing is a must. You will constantly be asked, for example, to write memos to colleagues and reports and proposals for superiors and clients.
Poor writing prevents good ideas from being disseminated.
There is more on how to write well in the term paper instructions. Let me just add to that by saying the best writers are the most voracious readers. And read good stuff. Of course, do the reading for this course, but also read novels, biographies, histories and good journalism such as the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and The New Yorker. To be a player in this economy, you can no longer just be good at taking orders and regurgitating facts.