So true! My Master’s is in Journalism (as was my Bachelor’s) with a focus on creative non-fiction writing. Grad school was the first time I’d taken creative writing workshop classes, and the difference between those and journalism writing classes was like night and day. In J classes, writing is edited or critiqued in very specific ways — addressing story structure, sentence structure, word choice, etc. The creative writing workshops were maddeningly vague! After getting feedback like, “I just think it’s too intense” or “I didn’t really get what you were going for here,” I would have to ask, these people have degrees in writing????

OK, sorry for the rant. Your article just hit the nail on the head so well.