A depressing essay. Just one more sign of the abysmal state of our educational system at all levels. I don’t think that you should get a college degree if you can’t write coherently and grammatically. Or graduate high school, for that matter.
I always found that the best way to learn how to wrote was to read, and appreciate, others’ writing.
More thoughts from George Leef. As he points out, inability to write clearly is probably indicative of an inability to think clearly.
It goes along with the dying art of reading, as illustrated in your previous post.
A big reason college degrees are a pre-requisite for so many jobs that otherwise don’t seem to require a college education is because a high school diploma is no longer a guarantee of even a basic level of literacy. So while tax payers keep paying more an more money per student for equally dismal results individuals are also screwed over because they now have to spend more years of their life and money out of their own pocket (or put themselves deeply in debt) to get a real education. And that’s aside from the issues of people who foolishly put themselves into debt and fail to get a real education as well (due to dropping out, picking a weak major, etc.)
I’ve read that it’s because while businesses used to give tests to prospective hires to test their intelligence, general knowledge, or aptitude, those tests have been denounced as “discriminatory”. Many businesses abandoned the practice for fear of antidiscrimination lawsuits. It’s easier and safer for them to just require a college degree.
Another point on this theme is that scientists commonly don’t know how to write anything that isn’t crushingly boring and scattered with technical terms for the sake of it. A rather good lampoon of this is the classic from Dr. Asimov called “The Endochronic Properties of Resublimated Thiotimoline” which may be available somewhere.
Hmmm. There used to be some excellent teachers at the author’s school who knew how to teach people to write but none of them were in the creative writing department. The creative writing department was all about poetry because the teachers never wanted to take the time to read 20 30 page short stories and then all of the drafts and revisions.
The writing classes all the freshmen had to take were pointless because no one cares to write papers about seemingly random topics that have no relationship to their chosen field of study. Very few of the English teachers knew anything outside their field. Sort of like math teachers who fail at showing how people actually use math in the real world. Both writing and math become much more engaging when students are able to see how they are applied in meatspace and not some herp d derp assignment.
I can feel a little sympathy for writing instructors because they have 20-30 kids in each class and depending on how many classes they teach, in addition to their own homework, they have a rather staggering page count to read every week. But it is work and they should take some pride in it and want to put in the effort to do a good job, just as it is expected in other professions.
And I still suck at grammar.
My eldest daughter and I attended the same high school.
They used to teach “Sentence Diagramming”. Deconstructing each individual sentence into subject, verb, object, prepositional phrase – on through gerunds etc. The subject gets -one- underline, the entire verb gets two, prepositional phrases are ‘branches’ ….
It is a very programming-like interpretation of what’s going on in a sentence. The visual-spatial arrangement was -very- helpful for me personally, yet it is no longer used. The story I heard from teachers and parents was that it is somewhat baffling to students that aren’t visual-spatial learners.
One key bit that this method highlights is dramatic rearrangement of the sentence into -all- plausible sensible arrangements. You’re just ‘dragging’ branches around to other spots that can support branches. Being -able- to do this type of rearrangement -quickly- is valuable. You can get out of the various wording ‘traps’ and also evaluate the various choices for flow, segues, or whatever.
A typical complaint about engineers is that they can’t write. It was a complaint 35 years ago, when I was in engineering school, and it still is today. But I’ve found that the fraction of well-written young engineers with whom I work is probably higher today than it was earlier in my career.
I don’t know where they are learning it, but they are. I don’t think all is lost — except, perhaps, among liberal arts majors.