Say it with words
When the class ended, one of the students hung back at the professor’s request. As a guest lecturer on a local college campus this week, I got to overhear the exchange. “Please don’t flunk me,” the student asked. “It’s not flunking you should be worrying about,” the professor said. “It’s your writing. You need to do a better job. Pay attention to what you’re trying to say.”
Left alone in the classroom, the professor talked quietly about what has become her abiding concern as she teaches students who are mostly in their last semesters of formal education. Few students can write clearly, she said— not even short essays, let alone longer papers that synthesize a lot of material.
You hear the concern from professors at both big research universities and many smaller institutions: College students, who are the top two- thirds of high school graduates, show up for higher education without communication skills considered basic a generation ago.
Nancy Zimpher, the State University of New York chancellor, has often complained about the $ 70 million SUNY must spend annually on remedial training for unqualified enrollees, much of it on language skills. More than a decade ago, as a member of the National Commission on Writing, she signed onto a report called The Neglected R, warning that unless schools do a better job of teaching writing, students won’t be prepared to succeed in college or in life.
The problem isn’t that kids can’t punctuate, or even that their grammar is imperfect. More troubling is that too many students can’t analyze information and marshal their thoughts about it into a coherent argument. When they’re given data or text to explore and weigh, many can’t tell you what it’s about.
If you think the absence of that skill isn’t at the root of many of our country’s problems right now, you’re not paying attention. We’re awash in opinion, but short on fact- based analysis. But our schools, weighted down with curriculum requirements aimed at developing science and technology skills, don’t require as much reading and writing as they once did.