Grammar and Writing: What Happened?

First, a couple of stories. A lady I know handed me a copy of her son's business plan written for a college course. She said she did not understand why the paper got an 87. She saw nothing wrong with it. I took a quick look and handed it back, saying nothing. She prodded me for my opinion and I told her I found multiple grammatical mistakes on the first page and important information missing from the table of contents. I thought an 87 was generous. The lady had a masters degree from a well known Texas university and she could not spot grammatical mistakes.

A young person I know came with a college paper. The student said the college grader told him to rewrite it, saying if she were to correct it she would just pour red ink onto the paper. The student said his mother, college educated, read the paper and could not see anything wrong. I spent 2.5 hours correcting the paper and it was indeed bathed in red ink.

I talked with this student and discovered he had A's in high school English from a Plano high school, commended scores in the English TAKS test, and above average SAT scores in writing. There is something wrong with the way writing is taught in public schools.

There are serious deficiencies in the writing skills of college students, both entering and leaving college. If you are a student at the University of North Texas and you want to major in journalism, you have to pass a test on grammar, spelling, and punctuation before you can take a journalism course. Obviously a high school diploma means nothing in regard to writing.

I have studied numerous books on grammar and writing. I know there are good books and good courses on writing, so what has gone wrong in Texas?

I recently finished a Teaching Company course, "Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writers Craft" by Brooks Landon of the University of Iowa (Ph.D. Univesity of Texas). Dr. Landon said that for all the great books written about crafting good sentences, teaching students how to write good sentences is now unfashionable. In Lecture 24 he quotes from a paper by Dr. Robert J. Connors, "The Erasure of the Sentence," who said that sentence based writing approaches are considered "...scientistic and therefore suspect, mechanistic and therefore destructive."

It seems as though every subject requiring skill is declared boring and dropped from the school curriculum or diminished to the point where students with good grades are at best marginally competent.

What is wrong in Texas is part of a nation-wide corruption of standards. It is a shame because there have been some remarkable works, like "A Lesson from Hemingway" by Francis Christensen in his Notes Toward a New Rhetoric that are very intelligent.

We need to admit the writing program in Texas public schools is flawed and fix it.

Robert Canright