It’s easy to keep the error rate constant if you write more and more simply. How is the vocabulary doing in that time? Complexity of sentence construction?

Stephen Downes, at 6:55 am EDT on July 11, 2006

Musgrave’s article cites empirical studies by highly regarded scholars in the field. Yet several of the Inside HE respondents prefer to rely on uninformed and unexamined personal opinion. The parallel would be to reject empirical studies that, say, asbestos causes certain lung cancers simply because it doesn’t match ones “sense” of things. Like every other academic field, composition studies relies on systematic, peer reviewed studies. These include, among other things, research on actual student writing. It’s not asking too much to have this research inform our beliefs and practice.Doug Hesse

Doug Hesse, at 8:31 am EDT on July 11, 2006

Who are you going to believe?

“Musgrave’s article cites empirical studies by highly regarded scholars in the field. Yet several of the Inside HE respondents prefer to rely on uninformed and unexamined personal opinion.”

Two things:

(1) What matters here is classroom reality, not a self-serving study by composition instructors. I know many of them, and they themselves cannot necessarily recognize incorrect English when they see it on the page. They are, in fact, consistently among the weakest writers I have met in the academy.

(2) I am speaking from decades of classroom experience and made no representations beyond it. You are basically saying here: “Who are you going to believe, composition instructors who are “highly regarded” by other composition instructors, or your lying eyes?” If students could actually write as well as is claimed here, I would have seen that skill over the past couple of decades in the top universities of the nation.

“Like every other academic field, composition studies relies on systematic, peer reviewed studies. “

The problem, beyond those mentioned above, is that composition PhDs are not trained in substantive disciplines, and they therefore cannot “peer review” any meaningful study of discipline-specific writing.

In point of fact, employers are spending billions each year to provide basic literacy training to employees who graduated from colleges with honors. That does not happen when people make fewer than ten errors an essay.

I remain highly skeptical, to say the least.

JBM, at 9:05 am EDT on July 11, 2006

Since there have been no empirical studies of student writing-error rates since the 80’s, I agree that we can only rely on the data we have. However, I suspect that much of what many of us perceive as students’ inability to write stems more from attitude than ignorance. While I have not seen any formal studies on the subject, anecdotal evidence (yeah, yeah, for what that’s worth), suggests that today’s students are “lazier” than those of earlier decades. While I may disagree with the label, I do think that today’s youth feel that more than an hour’s labor on a paper is excessive. This attitude stems from a variety of factors, none of which have much to do with their knowledge (or lack of it) about writing, grammar, spelling, or composition.

Jane Lasarenko, Writing and Thinking and Errors, Oh My!, at 9:10 am EDT on July 11, 2006

Our professors didn’t like our writing when we were students

In addition to the error studies which Musgrave cites, there is also documentary evidence —speeches, articles, commission reports— going back to the late 1800’s wherein college professors bemoaned the inability of incoming students to write well. Their complaints and observations about error, grammar, logic, and so on are identical to those we here today.

Among the most prominent of these come from the President of Harvard writing in the late 1890’s. So in one of our most prestigious universities, at a time when only well-to-do males could afford to attend, men with the best educations prior to college, we find the same complaints about student writing that we find today.

And that complaining hasn’t stopped.

Which means that every one of us in this discussion and every one of us who teaches at the college level was part of an entering college class where our professors complained that we couldn’t write worth a damn.

What happens might be two things.

1. Many of us were probably good enough writers to have perhaps placed out of first year writing, so that we didn’t see the struggles of fellow students. And so we might have wrote a little better and gotten better grades, but not seeing all else, assumed our peers were equal.

2. As we go through college and get our undergraduate degrees and then go into graduate school, we become, to a large extent, professional writers in our disciplines. We forget over time that there are things we didn’t know about writing or things that we didn’t do well at one time. And when see students who are novices, we sometimes lack the patience and empathy we no doubt were given by a caring teacher back in our more formative days.

But the bottom line is this: nothing’s changed in over a hundred years of college writing, except we’ve gone from being “them” to being “us,” and are now just as prone to the same complaints about our students that our professors had about us.

Nick Carbone, Director of New Media at Bedford/St. Martin’s, at 11:05 am EDT on July 11, 2006

Another data point: the real world

It’s possible to directly compare yesterday’s students to today’s students. Look out in the real world. Have any of these complainers ever read a corporate memo? I have. Horrible. Horrible! I have seen utterly unreadable prose from 50 year old corporate vice-presidents with MBAs. They were yesterday’s students.

Paul Gowder, at 11:25 am EDT on July 11, 2006

I agree with Havard professor A.S. Hill: it’s the fault of those high-school teachers, who are doing so little about teaching young people to write while we college professors are doing so much. He writes, “On the whole it seems fair to conclude that Harvard..., if not doing as much for the English of ... students as can reasonably be expected while the [high] schools do so little, is yet doing more and more every year, and that the most serious shortcomings in this respect on the part of ...recent graduates cannot be laid at [Harvard’s] door.” He wrote this just 127 years ago, in 1879. (Quoted in John C. Brereton’s _Origins of Composition Studies_, p. 56.)

Chuck Paine, at 12:30 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

More on Writing

One aspect of the problem of student writing that has not yet been touched on is the decline in reading, as noted by a recent study reported in the NYTimes that I wish I had kept. If a student does not read recreationally, that is to say, if a student does not voluntarily immerse him or herself in prose beyond class assignments, then there is very little chance that this student will become a good writer. It’s like asking someone who does not listen to music to become proficient at an instrument.

Second, none of the respondents (or the article) quotes any of the student writing under discussion. So here is an example from an e-mail I received last semester:

im throwing ideas around for the essay question : In Beowulf, how does the author seem to both celebrate and condemn the heroic ethos?....when you say “condemn the heroic ethos” does this mean your asking is the author condemning the heoric ethos of all characters that are avenging their kin or are you saying that through “heroism” and the fact that a hero in this book is defined by avenging ones kin from injustic and evil will always lead to “death” or “Condemnation.” Before i get all my ideas in order ide like to get the question right.

And before one says that the conventions of e-mail are looser, the final product was not markedly different.

Peter C. Herman, Professor at San Diego State University, at 1:05 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

Forgetting your past

Too often, we forget from whence we came. As a non-traditional student, I’m a bit closer to my freshman year, and I remember the void between highschool and going back to college. I’ve struggled with my own writing, and I would never consider myself a “good” writer. I’ve learned to edit and many students overlook that step. Personally, I don’t think it’s the writing skills of the students, but the lack of reading and writing in many of the writing courses. I’ve had students drop my course because they had to write too much. Writing is not easy—it’s hard work, and I have problems with instuctors who do not incorporate that into their course and then complain that their students are bad writers. Too often we try to make learning fun to the point of missing the learning.

I do, however, find problems with students in upper level courses who think they do not have to pay attention to their writing skills, since it isn’t a writing course. For some editing is only something you do in a composition course.

MU, at 1:30 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

Who I Part of the Problem?

I’ve been in the business of teaching English for 3.5 decades at a state-assisted university, and my experience informs me that student writing is not much worse now than it was in the 1970’s. The ability to think and the willingness to work, however, are endangered. But what catches me most about all of the comments on this article (with which I generally disagree, by the way) is the bad writing by the commentators, ranging from the egregious (e.g. “Who are you going to believe” and “we might have wrote") to the less serious but equally distracting comma fault. When those who think that they have something to say lack the skills to say it well, then their message loses credibility, if not validity. That’s what I keep trying to tell me students: All writing is argument, an no one wants to lose.

SG, Prof. of English, at 2:30 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

I think it’s possible to trust Ma and Pa Kettle’s research AND JBM’s anecdotes, as long as we remember that our anecdotes are typically based on a small sample of what passes before our eyes in students’ work, while the research is based on large samples of student writing and relies on rigourous statistical methods in analyzing those samples. As individual teachers, we fairly quickly read through the competent writing and even the good writing. But we spend frustrating hours on the poorer writing. So we remember that for our anecdotes, while the research on student writing includes in its averages all that solid writing that we quickly forget.

Helping students learn to write well is challenging business, and it’s a business that all of us teachers, no matter the discipline, must take seriously. We know, from our own experiences and from research, that people improve their writing by writing frequently, for a variety of audiences and purposes. That means that we can’t expect students to get their writing inoculation in first-year composition and be OK from there. We certainly weren’t. Instead, we have to provide substantial writing experiences in as many course and contexts—including extracurricular activities—as possible.

Bill Condon, at 2:45 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

Accepting Our Responsibility/The Tradition of Complaint

Thanks to Professor Musgrove and all the respondents. As a thirty-plus year veteran of college composition courses (as a teacher, I should add, not a student!) I’ve greatly enjoyed this conversation. There’s been much said about the abilities and the putative ineptitude of today’s college writers, but I want to reemphasize one of Musgrove’s points that has not received much discussion: “Our responsibility is to find out where [the students] are as early as we can and to discover the best methods for getting them where they need to be.” Put another way, our task is to teach our students to write the kind of prose we deem appropriate to college-level work, not to assume (or demand) that they have already been supplied with the requisite skills in high school. Just as we should not fall victim to the nostalgic myth of the Golden Age of our youth, whose legendary students put today’s college writers to shame, we should avoid subscribing to what Joe Williams, who taught linguistics for many years at the University of Chicago, referred to as “the tradition of complaint.” In the tradition of complaint, educators across the spectrum take delight in deploring the failure of teachers in the levels below them to prepare students properly for writing at the next stage. Having worked as a writing consultant for high schools, colleges, grad schools, professional schools, businesses, and law firms, Williams noted that teachers and administrators in each situation routinely lamented the failure of those who had previously worked with their students or employees. His point was that teachers, instead of seeking to blame others, should accept that it is their responsibility to instruct students in the type of writing expected in the new arena. Indeed, he believed, as do I, that it wasn’t even possible for teachers at a given level to provide the writing skills necessary at the next level, because any student entering an arena of writing is bound to be a novice in the new discourse and must learn to master it in context, with the help and support of the instructor—a point made earlier by Dennis Baron.

Leonard Podis, Prof Rhetoric & Composition & English at Oberlin College, at 3:25 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

High School English Teachers

I am a retired high school English teacher. We had 180-200 students in six classes that met back to back every day. My department was committed to helping students write well by having them write often, so we spent many hours grading papers. Our entry and exit essays showed that writing did improve in spite of the teaching load.

I would imagine that high school English teachers across the country still have too many students to teach writing effectively without a tremendous burden of paper grading. When school systems make a commitment to the teaching of writing by giving teachers a more reasonable load, then college teachers will be entitled to criticize them for not doing their job.

As someone else has already observed, I noticed many errors in the writing of some of the commentators. Students are not the only ones who don’t have perfect command of standard written English.

Carol Stachura, at 9:00 pm EDT on July 11, 2006

Oh. my

“Who I (sic) Part of the Problem?

I’ve been in the business of teaching English for 3.5 decades at a state-assisted (?) university, and my experience informs me that student writing is not much worse now than it was in the 1970’s. The ability to think and the willingness to work, however, are endangered. But what catches (sic) me most about all of the comments on this article (with which I generally disagree, by the way) is the bad writing by the commentators, ranging from the egregious (e.g. “Who are you going to believe” and “we might have wrote") to the less serious (sic) but equally distracting (sic) comma fault. When those who think that they have something to say lack the skills to say it well, then their message loses credibility, if not validity. That’s what I keep trying to tell me (sic) students: All writing is argument, an (sic) no one wants to lose.”

Your penultimate sentence is more correct than you perhaps realized.

As for the study, though people here have an obvious interest in dismissing classroom experience as mere “anecdote,” I do not have doctoral students who make so few errors in their writing. The results reported here fly in the face of experience, which leads me to question them. I have no idea how students used to write, but they sure are not making a couple of mistakes per hundred words.

Belle, at 9:10 am EDT on July 12, 2006

Reactions and my own ‘two cents’

I agree with Mr. Wolman regarding Mr. Baron’s contributions to the discussion. His points regarding the elements ‘underneath’ the alleged writing problems—which jibe with those of ESR, SG, and Bleck—are cogent and relevant.

I think that the lack of incisive reading skills and the general lack of curiosity, rather than writing mechanics, among most of my students are the things that contribute to what I call “the dearth of depth” that plagues our classrooms, both in discussion that can lead to good writing and within the papers themselves. The email that Mr. Herman received from a student was, to me, a breath of fresh air; THAT student wanted to have something to say within the confines of the assignment even if he/she did not present the request with proper mechanics. I wish I received such an email. Most of the student emails I receive are a combination of poor composition, inattentiveness, and worse thinking.

I was a high school English instructor for nearly 30 years, so I can commiserate with Ms. Stachura’s sentiments. But the ending of her post reminded me of others I received from students who seemed to be emotionally enured from any form of critical commentary and want to ’splash back.’ Perhaps that, too, is one of the major difficulties facing us: more and more incoming students have never faced truly consistent objective criticism to their work and don’t know how to react to it. Maybe that lack of critical dialogue is one reason the students stay way from any Writing Center. We are currently at the end of the ’self esteem’ generation of students—we have maybe two more years to go, although some of the urban groups may linger. Many of these students seem to have protective shields to any source of critical discourse that might dent their fragile egos. I try to balance fact and tone, but our growing reliance on cyber communication isn’t helping because the students’ lack of sensitive and incisive reading skills (along with a peculiar inability to communicate with authority figures—helicopter parents?).

The “creative writing” emphasis of our public school systems has evolved into a “creative reading” approach that blunts our ability to teach logical approaches to communication. Some of our problem is our fault, I’m afraid; literary postmoderism (and the need to manage motley-configured classrooms) has bled into basic education, leading to the minds we now have to teach in the college classroom—self-satisfied and lacking in analytical skills.

One suggestion: talk to people in business and get quotes from them about how they want graduates to know how to write—link the need to learn to what students perceive to be their ‘destiny.’ I realize that liberal educators see a purpose beyond ‘the workplace,’ but more and more students don’t. Anything to get students to care about detail and expression will help.

One more suggestion: forget the ‘writing test’ before college; test reading, instead, not only for literary elements but also for the ability to find and identify details. The result of such a test will tell us more about the ability of students to generate better college writing than a generic writing test will.

Jeff Cebulski, Visiting Instructor at University of West Georgia, at 1:35 pm EDT on July 12, 2006

Knickers in a twist

When I taught at an expensive private high school, parents would complain — first to me, and then to the school head — if their precious wee ones weren’t getting high grades. Never once did a parent ask me: what can we do at home to help my child improve his/her study, reading, and writing skills?

In corporate America (I work in quite a technical field) the writing that I see is very accomplished because the purpose is clear, the audience is evident, and the stakes are so very high. It’s my guess that in a first-year comp class, where the “teacher” is likely a criminally underpaid contingent laborer and the “work” seems to have little purpose, much less reward, students simply don’t see the point. Much less the interest.

Here’s a radical proposition. Get rid of first-year writing courses altogether. Once students choose a major, they’ll read not lovely literary essays but writing that has direct application to what they need to know. If they begin to fail in their writing, they’re probably failing in their knowledge of the discipline as well.

And if they leave college so dimwitted that they can’t get a job, they can go back to live with their mums and dads who thought they were so brilliant all the way along.

SMS, Former high school teacher, current corporate writer, at 7:20 am EST on November 17, 2006