I'm not asking for another Shakespeare

I'm just looking for some decent writing. It seems to be a fast-fading skill.

As a graduate student, I've churned out a lot of papers, which are closely scrutinised for the facts and arguments contained within, and the writing itself. The brutal honesty that graduate students receive on their papers is a good way to learn what constitutes decent writing. As a teaching assistant, my primary job is to grade papers and it has exposed me to all manners of writing styles. Why am I telling you this? So that you know that I have some background knowledge of the topic and what opinions my experience has garnered.

Recently, I sat down with a set of midterm papers for correction. As a basic survey-level course, the class is open to all undergraduates. This means you see a fair variety of writing levels. As a general rule they tend to be okay, with passable language and grammar usage. Occasionally, there are excellent papers and, just as occasionally, there are appalling ones.

This time, the one labelled, "Midterm Thing" was the primary motivator for this blog. The downward slide began when the student used words & phrases such as "whodunnit", "fiddly" and "yeah, probably" in their essay as well as their disregard for punctuation (such as the usual of capitals at the beginning of a sentence and periods...little, finnicky things). My first thoughts: How did this kid get into college? What did their entrance essay look like? And considering that all Canadian high-schoolers have to take English-12 and provincial exams etc, which self-respecting teacher and/or examiner passed this student?

I come back to this after grading a stack of final papers which has pushed me to actually post this blog. The writing was, if anything, worse than the midterms, which was somewhat surprising considering the students got more time to develop their ideas and do their research. Now I know that many students still left the papers to the last minute, (who hasn't done that in college?) but the general standard was appalling.

Writing standards seem to be declining. As much as it pains me to do this, I go easy on language when grading, as per the general departmental attitude towards undergraduate writing. But when and why did bad writing become acceptable at the college level? These are not young kids who have little to no training in writing, they have graduated from high school after all. Am I bringing an elitist element to writing by stressing on proper punctuation, smooth language etc. etc.? Don't misunderstand me by thinking that I'm asking for brilliant prose. Brilliance is, by its very nature, an achievement of few. On the other hand, competence and striving towards excellence is not. Most good academic writing is not very complex, it's beauty lies in clarity. A few polysyllabic words don't go amiss but they are not crucial for displaying competency in writing.

The point of college is to teach. This is not characterised by simply imparting information on a subject, but building skills to analyse and manipulate data, taking the information forward in new/different directions. Writing is a key tool in managing the latter component of college education, in my opinion.

Are television and chat and text messages responsible for the decline in formal prose? I don't want to sound like a white-haired biddy railing against 'youngsters today', mostly because I'm still quite young myself, but I do think that modern technology has had its fair share of negative effects. At the same time, I don't think its fair to blame computers and television for the failures in education. After all, I watched television almost daily as a child. And we had a computer in my house where I spent a fair amount of time on pacman and other video games. The difference is that I spent hours reading. And not just books like Sweet Valley Twins (which I confess to reading) but also Little Women, the Chronicles of Narnia, St. Clairs, Anne of Green Gables etc. My father actually read The Hobbit to me and my brother in installments at bedtime. And we were encouraged to peruse the newspaper, and actively enjoyed the weekly children's supplement (which is printed to this day--why don't the Times or the Boston Globe do that?).

What I'm saying is, parents and schools need to push reading and writing in order to better develop writing skills way in advance of college. College will polish those skills and refine them in readiness for stepping out into the work-world, but it shouldn't be expected to teach the basics. And colleges need to have higher standards than they do now, because letting bad writing go on is a disservice to students who are attending school for better/higher education.