I went into IT in 1995 after having bounced between math and English departments at various colleges since the age of...well, since 1974...and when Dr. C says English professors "teach flowery expression, and consider clarity, brevity, syntax, and punctuation as secondary issues, issues they would rather not have to deal with", he is, in my experience, dead wrong.

I have never met a composition teacher of whom that is true.

In fact, I've never met a composition teacher who approved of "flowery expression"--flowery will get you redlined in freshman comp and laughed out of creative writing. The book we used in both my first creative writing course and my survey of poetry is the brilliant (now overpriced) Sound and Sense by Laurence Perrine, who has this to say in chapter 15, "Bad Poetry and Good":

"Rhetorical poetry uses a language more glittering and high flown than its substance warrants. It offers a spurious vehemence of language--language without a corresponding reality of emotion and thought underneath. It is oratorical, overelegant, artificially eloquent. It is superficial and, again, often basically trite. It loves rolling phrases like 'from the rocky coast of Maine to the sun-washed shores of California' and 'our heroic dead' and 'Old Glory.' It deals in generalities. At its worst it is bombast. In this book an example is offered by the two lines quoted from the play-within-a-play in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream:

"Whereat with blade, with bloody, blameful blade,
He bravely broached his boiling bloody breast."

I will grant that creative writing teachers are typically tolerant of unusual syntax and punctuation, if they serve the purpose of the writer, but even that has its limits.

I never took a class from this guy because I was friends with him and his family: http://www.arktimes.com/Articles/ArticleViewer.aspx?ArticleID=b732eb20-4231-403d-a8fb-678f726c69e6 , but I do remember walking down the corridor of Kimpel Hall with him and trying to express my love and admiration for Kathy Acker's Blood and Guts in High School.

The book has a lot of power just from Acker's command of language, but she does more. She's got hand-drawn maps of characters' dreams in it, an Arabic grammar that tells a story, a tour de force passage in which two poems are interleaved, line by line, and are coherent narrative read separately or together. It's a piece of experimental writing which, atypically, works.

I remember Bill's response: "So, it's got some funny stuff in it?" He didn't mean comedy.

Math or English (and maybe philosophy, theology, or history) will prepare you for a complete, well-rounded life--personal, professional, and civic--better than any other undergraduate curriculum.

P.S. The current eleventh edition of Perrine is priced at about twice what it's worth, so if you see an old edition cheap, buy it as a gift for any aspiring poet, young or old.