The Kids are ‘Alwrite’

Abstract

Criticizing students' writing ability is nothing new. However, Mr. Gold suggests, it might be more productive to teach them instead. EACH FALL, the nation's newspapers are filled with laments over the decline in the writing skills of college students. What makes this trend especially depressing is that a good many of the complaints are leveled by those who should know better -- writing teachers. Today's students, we are told, don't know how to -- or even care to -- express their views, churn out illiterate or semiliterate scribbling when they do, and have grammar so atrocious that their writing fails to meet the standards once required of third-graders. Not one of these charges would receive a passing grade in my freshman English class. Indeed, when I share them with my students, they have no trouble pointing out their flaws: decontextualized claims, lack of supporting evidence, ad hominem attacks, strawman arguments, thoughtless cliches, and overblown generalizations. My students might not have William Safire's vocabulary or mastery of prescriptive grammar (nor, I suspect, did he at their age), but they consistently manage to distill the strategies they study into reasonable, even stylish, written arguments. Meanwhile, their critics, despite their professed reverence for the past, ignore 2,000 years of good writing advice, from Aristotle to E. B. White. Worse, they demonstrate a woeful ignorance of their own profession. Since English was introduced as a university subject, each generation has produced its Chicken Littles claiming the sky is falling and setting off another round of national hand-wringing over another imagined crisis. In 1987, E. D. Hirsch warned that our nation was on the brink of cultural illiteracy. Some 30 years ago, Newsweek proclaimed that Johnny couldn't write. Fifty years ago, Rudolf Flesch insisted that Johnny couldn't read. Over a hundred years ago, professors at Harvard sounded the alarm at declining standards. Reading admissions essays in 1888, Le Baron Russell Briggs complained, More than all, I am discouraged by wooden unintelligence. . . . Dullness is the substance of scores of themes, and inaccurate dullness at that. . . . The average theme seems the work of a rather vulgar youth with his light gone out. An expert committee formed to look into the problem laid the blame -- surprise -- on high schools, which apparently no longer insisted upon rigorous instruction in English. That turn-of-the-century college students couldn't write would not have surprised those students' grandparents, of course, who would probably have faulted not declining standards of English instruction but the introduction of English instruction, which many faculty members believed could never match the character-building discipline of memorizing Latin and Greek grammar. …