Posted on 09/07/2018 7:40:02 AM PDT by reaganaut1
By wide agreement of writing professors and composition scholars, new freshmen arrive not only ill-prepared for college writing but many show little improvement after four years of undergraduate education.
In 2002 the College Board established the National Commission on Writing, which found “growing concern within the education, business, and policy-making communities that the level of writing in the United States is not what it should be.” This may be the mother of all understatements. Using 2004 figures that have not been updated, a 2016 story at Inc. Magazine reported that U.S. businesses spend $3.1 billion annually on remedial writing training for their employees and new hires. The cost is likely much higher.
For a story in the Harvard Business Review, Josh Bernoff surveyed 547 business chiefs and found that 81 percent of them “agree that poorly written material wastes a lot of their time. A majority say that what they read is frequently ineffective because it’s too long, poorly organized, unclear, filled with jargon, and imprecise.”
Writing consultant Jodi Torpey quotes a 2012 60 Minutes segment in which a manufacturing executive, Ryan Costella of Click Bond, laments the poor writing of recent college graduates “who can’t put a sentence together without a major grammatical error.” Applicants who can’t write a proper resume, he says “can’t come to work for us. We’re in the business of making fasteners that hold systems together that protect people in the air when they’re flying. We’re in the business of perfection.”
The problem, as college writing instructor John Maguire has explained here, is that high school graduates start college “with fully established sentence rot.” They haven’t been taught to write in clear, complete sentences. They don’t understand the purpose of a sentence or how to construct one.
(Excerpt) Read more at jamesgmartin.center ...
Clear communication is white privilege.
This was already going on in high schools in the 1990s. I think they loaded up with newer teachers coming out in the 1980s, who were not up to the job....probably lesser qualified in nature. The university professors aren’t willing to dump the kid or revoke their status....so they keep passing them onto the classes, and eventually they graduate.
I don’t know how it is now, but college clearly did not teach me to write. Vocabulary too.
It was only by being around people who could speak and write, and reading tons of well-written pieces that I finally grew out of it and learned.
Colleges should drop the farce of “Term papers” and concentrate on shorter, more practical writings. Like business letters, memos, short research papers, etc. And the vocabulary that supplements the technical terms.
I used to hate vocabulary exercises in high school and book reports, themes, compositions, etc. there and in college too. How foolish. Learn, Baby, Learn. Drill, Baby, Drill.
I’ll never forget an incident that happened (sadly frequently) in my Master’s writing program at a very well respected, very difficult to get into program and private university. One day a professor went off on a liberal rant the entire class. We were paying out the nose for our ‘education’ hours. It had absolutely nothing to do with writing or the betterment there of. Often these yahoos took significant class time away from our learning for their self centered rants.
bmp
A second point (which is ironic when one thinks of how one sided and illogical a lot of liberal rants are--they call them points but whatever lol.) I learned is to bring up arguments/points that go against or even contradict your own argument and show why they are wrong or don't work. This technique not only eliminates the oppositional argument/point. It strengthens your own point. I believe this is compare and contrast.
Fundamental paper writing is often dry. Any truly successful writer brings unique and interesting perspectives and styles into their work which is often not taught/nurtured in schools.
I love that you have learned from reading well written works. So very true. Those writers are the true teachers ;D.
Keep it simple with some dry humor.
Write like you talk, but better.
Eliminate superfluous adjectives.
Don’t over-explain. People can supply their own details from their life experience.
Pander to your audience.
At most prestige universities and liberal arts colleges, “freshman English” (grammar and composition) has been replaced by “first year seminar” courses. The latter are taught by faculty across the range of disciplines, and what instruction on actual writing skills students receive in them is largely a roll of the dice.
You mean “prestigious”?
these teachers are the products of teaching schools where all the dummies at universities got their BA’s
The complete sentence is overrated because when
There’s a reason that Rhetoric (Argumentation) was taught from the beginning in a classical education. No student should graduate high school without being able to make a coherent, reasoned argument.
The rule is the last named subject(s) is what is identifying the upcoming pronoun. So many people do not follow this rule making it super confusing which THEY or HE/SHE they are referring to.
An example of this would be. "John and Tim are coming to the party. He is going to bring the turkey." One should assume the speaker means Tim as he was the last subject. But is this who the writer means?
A well defined pronoun entails saying "John and Time are coming to the party. John is bringing the turkey." So much clearer.
Also taking the time to to define what THIS or IT or THING means in a verbal or written conversation not only clarifies what one is saying. But it also causes us to think and get to the bottom of what exactly we are saying and meaning. This specificity adds to a richer use of vocabulary and precision in conversation. It adds wonderful clarity.
I guess I did learn something from my expensive education. lol.
sure
I sure wish journalists used the effective writing tactics I learned in the military. If you want to be a novelist put it in a book.
Great point.
Writing must be taught by those who can “write.”
I homeschooled, used A-Beka, so good curriculum, but I was never much of a writer and so in 5th grade we hired a writing tutor. Our son went to her for
4 years because we knew he’d be entering our dual enrollment program once
he was in 9th grade.
She did a marvelous job and her tutorship allowed our kiddo to breeze through
any writing assignment in college, and in grad school, when they had a group project, he was always assigned the task of writing it and putting all the parts of the report together.
I know dozens of families who used this same teacher as a writing tutor, and each has the same story, their kids breezed through writing assignments while in college.
My whole point is the teachers who are teaching writing in the schools, probably aren’t “writers” themselves.
I suspect that the problem is that women have more career opportunities now than in the past. When I was a youngster (I graduated from high school in ‘71 - I’ll let you guess the century) a college educated woman in the work force could either be a teacher or a nurse. As a result, we had some pretty smart teachers. These days, with so many more opportunities, women are not constrained to these two fields, and the smarter ones probably tend to seek employment in other fields.
I am not suggesting that we go back to the “Good Old Days”. I want my daughter to be able to purse any career she wants (and she just entered an RN program), but I suspect that an unintended and unavoidable consequence of Womens’ Lib (for what of a better term) is a severe degradation in elementary and secondary teachers.
I work with grad students who cannot make themselves understood, they can’t make a sentence with a subject and predicate... and wouldn’t know what those things are.
They send e mails that I have to read 3 and 4 times to comprehend.. and likely not then, either.
No punctuation, no caps no paragraphs... etc. (Forget spelling)
The professors are NO better... maybe worse
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