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