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About Oregon daily emerald. (Eugene, Or.) 1920-2012 | View Entire Issue (April 24, 1986)
F 1) V C A T I () N Dangerous Challenge As schools push to improve student writing, a novice instructor examines his task A I ne alarm* first sounded utxmt a arcade ago: writing skills, even anion# the best and brightest of college students, were deterio rating rapidly. many critics sau it. the main problem was tha telemen tary and six ondary schools uere no longer demanding the rigorous development of literary skills. Whatever the cause, the results were dis turbing Verbal scows on the Scholastic Aptitude Test dropped sharply, year after year, beginning in lWifi Even highly selec tive colleges had to enroll lurge numbers of freshmen in courses nicknamed "bonehead English. " Graduate schools of law. busi ness and journalism were forced to estab lish remedial writing courses of their own. And still, the cries of dismay echoed in the halls of commerce and the professions, where writing is the basis for almost all formal communication In resjxmse. colleges and universities across the country began paying new atten tion to writing. Today, according to the Na tional Center for Education Statistics. 73 percent of all institutions of higher educa tion offer courses in remedial writing, and more than one out of every five freshmen take them. Hut even so, professors re/xirt that they confront a basic—and almost in tractable—problem: attitude. "Students are motivated economically." says Robert Harm, chairman of the philosophy depart ment at Florida International in Miami. "I don't think many of them see writing as a marketable commodity." It is, of course. And in the years ahead, as the information explosion reaches propor tions unthinkable just a decade ago, the ability to sort, distill, organize and analyze what is tru ly imjxirtunt—and com m unica te it to the stx'iety at large—will be increasing ly important. Those skills happen to be the very essence of good writing. To find out how writing instructors approach the task of im parting them to students, Nkwswkkk On Campus asked Demits A. Williams, former inkwswkiCK tMucauon cah inl and now a teacher of writing at Cornell, to reflect on his experiences. I knew the job was danger ous when I took it. During five years as Newsweek's Education Editor, I wrote extensively about the de clining academic performance of American students That de cline included a serious erosion in writing skills It was general wisdom that nobody taught grammar, or style, or clear thinking There were fewer es say questions on exams and more multiple-choice items. .Job applications, memos and reports were all sinking into il literacy, and employers com plained that they were being sent people who couldn’t rub two sentences together and make a spark. Educators were rallying to correct these defi JON KKIS Trust me: Williams on the job at Cornell ciencies, but I had no illusions when I be came a writing instructor at Cornell. Brutal commant: Admittedly, I did not have all the training more experienced writing teachers have. I didn’t know all the jargon or the diagnostic techniques, and I had to develop my own system of margin com ments. (The ones that magazine editors use ure far too brutal for col lege students.) But I knew bud writing when 1 saw it and had a pretty good idea how to iix it. I got to set* a lot of it right away. Each year, Cornell invites as many as one-quar ter of its entering freshmen—nearly MOO students—to take a writing-assessment test during their first weekend on campus. As one of the test evaluators, I read more t han 60 of the pupers—short essays written in about 45 minutes under conditions hurd ly conducive to thoughtfulness. Most of the essays I saw were not horrible, but few could be considered good. 1 knew that student writing, in general, had deteriorated, yet 1 was amazed at some of what I saw: painfully short essays with little thought; two-page papers written in one kitchen-sink paragraph; scrambled syntax; bad-guess spelling; time-warp tenses and subjects and verbs that couldn’t agree if their lives depended on it. Occa sionally, against my better judgment, I looked up a student’s admissions-test scores—even though 1 have little faith in those tests. Still, 1 was surprised and dis heartened to see, here and there, a badly troubled writing samplecoming from a stu dent with a well-above-average score. Eventually, about 120 students—most M L' U' C’ Ilf L’ L’ L* t \ KT /' l (IMIIO A 1