Abstract
Chapter 1 be especially important to undergraduate science students, whose confidence in their own abilities as writers may have been damaged by experiences with writing in the classroom during their schooling (Choi et al., 2010;Shanahan, 2004).Several of the scientists and mathematicians in this study discuss damaging experiences with school and English teachers in particular.The anxious mathematics student, sitting in a writing class, who reads this comment by a successful applied mathematician, What's interesting is I did mathematics, I think, because I found English so difficult . . .I failed . . . on English and I was fine on mathematics.I was top in maths but I was desperate in English.I can remember the essay.The title was "Your House."Now as a mathematician . . .I've got to write about my house.What is my house?And I went to numbers straight away.It's got five windows, it's got one door-this is age 10 or 11.I knew it was a disaster when I wrote it.But I was incapable of doing anything better-Timothy, Chapter 3. may recognise a similar incident of their own, and may never have realised that the successful science or mathematics professor in their writing classroom may have experienced this kind of setback.Reading of