The war against inarticulacy

As long ago as 1948, at the Royal Society Conference on Scientific Information, Professor E. N. da C. Andrade was protesting about scientists who write “matter that is unintelligible not on account of its difficulty but on account of the confusion of thought, the lack of sequence and the tangled, sometimes ungrammatical jargon in which it is expressed”. Have our university departments made any attempts to improve the speech? and writing of their students? Most employers complain strongly about the lack of linguistic skill among new graduates.