I can’t speak for MIT’s admissions office, but I can certainly speak in general. A lot of really crappy, completely dense, horribly written things get published in STEM fields. You can build a career being completely terrible at English. This is not recommended. For one, I know many professors, graduate students, and so on that have flat out rejected papers and methods for being impossible to comprehend.
That is a reference that person could have gotten, we would have cited their paper if we used their methods or results as a starting point like we planned. That would have increased their academic standing.
I have seen papers where the algorithm or concept as presented was fundamentally broken given the way they described it. Through weeks of trying, we eventually arrived at what we suspected they meant by what they wrote. This is also not a good way to do research.
I TAd an upper division AI course at my university (hardly Ivy, but top 50 in my field). This involved a lot of formal math (proofs and the like). Do you know what I did when somebody’s grammar was terrible? Completely disregarded the part I couldn’t understand. That brought their grade down. Now, this makes me sound like more of a hardass than I actually was, all things considered I probably was an easier than a harder grader, but I was simply not going to spend hours deciphering gibberish in the hopes that a student super double secretly understood what they were talking about, the professor agreed. You might say “but in pre-calc!” No, stop right there, you do not know what higher level math looks like. Higher level math involves a lot of writing – in fact, when I took Automata I probably wrote more words in a single paper than formal notation in the whole class. Even in a class as simple as linear algebra it was probably about 50/50 words/formal notation. Heck, one of the first things I learned in college is that it’s much easier to get partial credit on a problem you’re struggling with if you explain your approach in words and pictures instead of flailing around with equations and constants that only make sense to you.
Finally consider your post-MIT life. I assume you’re planning on getting a position somewhere after you graduate. Let’s say you want to do data analytics at Google or something. Those famous tech companies? They value communication immensely, Google and Microsoft specifically (many Math majors apply there – it’s not just computer stuff) ask many questions of the form “explain <x> like you’d explain it to your grandma.” The ability to speak clearly, coherently, and simply is considered the mark of an intelligent person. The more you flail and talk with industry jargon and buzzwords while trying to explain a concept, the more they suspect you don’t really understand it. We had an upstart tech company come in and try to recruit people once and the first red flag was inability to simply articulate what they were looking for in the database programmers they wanted to recruit.
I’ve had professors supervise my research that force you to communicate what you’re doing in a paragraph or less, with as few technical details as possible. Hell, I work heavily under the assistant director of a department at my university and he flat out told me once that they were rejecting several very smart, intelligent potential grad students with amazing grades (on paper) just because they couldn’t convey information clearly in favor of lesser qualified students (on paper) who could communicate.
Yes, you can probably get into MIT and even have a decent career with middling communication and English skills, but you will face a great number of hurdles that could easily be avoided simply learning to convey information in a clear manner (and I’m not perfect at it either, I’m still learning a lot). I’m not saying you have to be a poet. In many ways what an average high-schooler or college undergrad would consider an “English type” is pretty poor at communication, at least in the ways that matter for a STEM field. You just have to be able to write in a way that will get as many people to understand you in as efficient a manner as possible. You can splice a comma, split infinitives, or use the passive like a mofo. It just matters whether the grammar is consistent and sound.
Yes, I perfectly realize the irony of talking about conciseness and efficiency in a post this long and rambling. No, pointing out my inevitable grammar, spelling, style, or usage mistakes will not in any way invalidate my points (and in fact is a logical fallacy).
