The Chronicle of Higher Education has an odd habit of printing feel-good personal essays that, when read closely, chill one to the bone with their blithe naivete and their inability to see the implications of their position. Such a one is this week's column by James M. Jasper, "Why So Many Academics Are Lousy Writers." The essay purports to be a gentle analysis of why so much academic writing is bad--so gentle that the noble reader will not feel personally implicated in its operative premise, will not feel attacked as a bad writer, but can instead sit back with Jasper, nod knowingly and conspiratorially ("Yes, my boy, academic writing is rather awful, now that you mention it"), and muse along with him about the possible causes for this pervasive yet unacknowledged problem ("What can it be, do you suppose? Is it the corporatization of the university? Is it hegemony? Our interpellation as discursively-transcoded subjects?").

To his credit, Jasper steers clear of such absurd explanations (explanations that carry real weight, I should add, in certain politicized corners of the university). Academics are lousy writers, Jasper suggests, because no one has ever told them they need to work on their writing. He uses himself as an example, pointing out how at every stage of his career, from student onward, he has flattered himself, as so many of us do, that he is a fine writer indeed; how this self-flattery grew not out of positive knowledge, but out of the absence of criticism; and how, at several points in his career, he has been lucky enough to encounter teachers, editors, and colleagues who take the time to show him a thing or two, and so help him improve a product he had not realized was lacking. It's a sweet essay, as far as it goes, with a useful reminder that we should all, always, be looking to sharpen our writing, and that we should never simply assume our writing is good, or even merely acceptable, just because we don't hear arguments to the contrary. But it's also a disturbingly blinkered essay, one that resolutely refuses to name the pedagogical malpractice it is describing for what it is.

Let's redescribe the problem. Why do so many academics write so poorly? Because their teachers did not teach them to write well. They did not do their job. And because they did not do their job, they produced students who could not write--some of whom went on to become academics who not only did not teach their own students to write well, but could not, for the simple reason that they did not know good writing from bad. It's one thing when this happens in the sciences. It would be lovely if all chemists described their work in melodious, pristine prose, and the world of chemistry would certainly be a better place for it if they could. But science still goes on in the absence of clear expression. Writing is important to science, but it is not identical to it. Writing is not what science is, or what it studies. The situation is far different in the humanities, however, especially in English, where writing is the content and the form of both the curriculum and of the career. An English major reads literature and writes papers about it. An English professor reads literature (sometimes) and writes books and articles about it. Writing is not incidental to the study of literature or to the profession of letters--and yet English majors are, as a group, notoriously not good writers, while scholarly writing in the humanities is by and large jargon-ridden, clunky, obscure, and ugly stuff. The situation in English is disturbing, for it suggests that the main business of that department--to teach students how to express themselves clearly and forcefully in writing--is not only not getting done, but is not particularly valued by those whose job it is to do it.

A case in point: freshman writing. At Ph.D.-granting institutions, 96% of freshman English classes are taught by graduate students (the overwhelming majority of whom hail from English). Many of these grad students are only a year or two out of college; very few have more than a year or two of teaching experience; many have never taken freshman English themselves (having tested out); most are learning on the job, with little or no training beforehand; most have no interest in becoming teachers of writing--they want to become professors of literature, and leave the writing courses to future generations of grad students; many thus use the freshman English classroom to practice teaching literature rather than to teach the elements of composition. More to the point: no one ascertains that the grad students who are assigned to teach freshman writing can indeed write. No one checks to see if they know a dangling participle when they see one, or if they can make their subjects and verbs agree, or if they can write in the active voice, or if they understand the mechanics of sentences and paragraphs. It is assumed, for the purposes of staffing (this is a cheap and plentiful pool of teachers), that enrollment in a Ph.D. program with satisfactory completion of requirements therein is itself qualification for teaching writing. It is not. To put it bluntly: English departments leave the teaching of writing not only to students who have not demonstrated their qualifications in that arena, but who are, with few exceptions, not being taught to write by their professors, who either cannot recognize the problems with their grad students' writing, or do not see it as their job to descend from the lofty heights of idea to the low, dull level of grammar and syntax. There are exceptions, of course--but what I have just sketched out is the rule.

Jasper's kinder, gentler commentary on lousy academic writing can only seem kinder and gentler if we think of writing narrowly, as something scholars do for other scholars, rather than as something scholars ought themselves to be teaching. The case of English is a telling one in this regard. This is the department that lays claim to language like no other, that makes its case for itself by touting its ability to impart the ability to read and write. But this is also a department where the faculty do not themselves reliably cultivate clarity or grace of expression, and where the arduous work of teaching writing is first dumped into the ghetto of composition (as if literature classes could not also be courses in writing), and then shoved into the ill-prepared hands of graduate students who are expected to teach writing without ever having first been taught it.