In response to yesterday's post, Captain Yips writes to propose a forum on the ethics of teaching English:

It might be interesting to begin a discussion of what you think would be involved in more ethical approach to English. This topic involves approaches to culture, and shakes the tower from kindergarten through graduate school. If we were to rebuild the study of English from the sub-basement to the turret, how? What are the current ethical failings of Big U English, and how widely have they spread? Could be an enlightening donnybrook.

I'd love readers to weigh in on this, and will open comments. Possible topics include:

--the peripheral role of writing instruction in college English

--grade inflation (particularly as it indicates a failure to respond honestly to student writing)

--the conflict of interest that is built into many university writing programs, in which freshman composition is taught by unmentored, untrained graduate students who are placed in the classroom not because they have demonstrated qualifications to teach college writing, but because their contract stipulates that they must teach comp to receive their stipend and because they need teaching experience

--the tremendous reliance of English departments on underpaid, uninsured adjunct teachers

--the vanishing job market

--the overproduction of Ph.D.s and the various exploitations, false advertisings, and malpractices therein

--the politicization of literary study

--the post-structuralization of literary study

--the disappearance of collective disciplinary standards about what constitutes scholarly excellence

--the disappearance of a collective disciplinary sense of mission

--the disappearance of collective disciplinary consensus about what constitutes "English"

--the devaluation of teaching, especially at elite research institutions

--how or whether one may inhabit a discipline that is so rudderless and so ethically compromised in so many ways, without selling one's soul

--how or whether the problems outlined above may be constructively addressed or even resolved

--how we might usefully think--or rethink--the relationships among K-12 English education, college English, graduate English education, teaching English, and "professing" English

And so on.

Professor O'Connor has finally nailed her theses to the cathedral door.

May she escape the stake. And let the reformation begin.

It is NOT about ME*ME*ME!

Professors don't count. English counts. Don't like English grammer, spelling, and usage? Find another job.

English is how this nation communicates--across space and across time.

If we are to learn the lessons of the 19th and 20th centuries then English must be stable across time. This includes history and LITERATURE. English has already drifted noticably since the 18th century. This drift must stop. If it interfers with some professor or writer's creativity then too bad.

It is also how we comunicate across space. Never mind just the Anglosphere, English is the linga franca of the world--unmatched since Latin. If peoples and nations are to work together then they must be able to understand each other. This will--again--require a stable language. If this interfers with a professor's pet theories, well, then they can go in the trash bin.

English professors are "Keepers of the Flame." They must preserve the language, teach its best literature, and nag the rest of use about fine points of grammer.

Enough of politics and naval gazing. Do your jobs.

Small nomenclatural point: I'm Erin. Professor O'Connor is my father.

Oh my. I'm an undergraduate in English in the UC system, and I've been lucky, very lucky, in coming into only glancing contact with some of the problems you allude to in your series of questions. My thoughts on this monster of an issue:
There are two relatively unrelated problems: 1. the unprepared and uninterested students 2. the dishonesty of the higher education system as a whole. (Yes, vast and all-encompassing, I know.) Can we ever constructively address either? It appears not. Never underestimate the stupidity of people in large groups and all that.
#1 requires an overhaul of the K-12 system based not on "No Child Left Behind So Lets All Just Stand Still" nonsense, but on keeping the bar high at each grade level so that students will actually fail grades and be held back. We need to stop being afraid of failing students. The other half of this overhaul would of course be a massive pouring of money into the public education system so that schools are fully-equipped and well-staffed with highly-trained teachers earning at least twice their current salaries. Masters degrees should be the standard expectation for teachers. I consider the whole devaluation of teaching problem to be partly based on a lack respect for the profession and a lack of reward for hard work. Oh, and make grammar lessons mandatory again. Please.

Anyway, I'm dreaming. This will never happen in this society, because the system is so far gone that no one can comprehend it in its entirety. I'm taking my children abroad for their K-12.

#2 is thornier for me to analyze, because I'm really not in the loop. Someone else can propose solutions. I just know that there is going to have to be a monumental consensus in favor of honesty within the profession. i.e. my professors should not be encouraging me to pursue a doctorate in English, at least not without some serious discussion of "what it's really like in this crazy world." But they are.

Well, there you go. The naive opinions of an undergraduate English major. Whee. I hope to see much more discussion on this.

I thought it was important to comment on this issue, especially since I am a graduating English major in the midst of a career crisis. This fall, I applied to PhD. programs in English with the hope that at least one of the nine institutions to which I submitted my application would accept me. I am, after all, a straight-A student with excellent test scores and recommendations. Despite these qualifications, I was rejected from every university across the board.

When I called schools to obtain some information about the decision process, the answers I received regarding my rejections were interesting to say the least. The schools did not take issue with my grades, test scores, or recommendations. My writing sample and personal statement were, in fact, lauded by many prestigious institutions for their ingenuity and thoughtfulness. Ultimately, I was told that, if I applied again in the following year, I would be admitted without reservation. Unfortunately, I don't have a year to waste and I should not be forced to suffer the consequences of these institutions' unjustified, illogical rejections.

This experience, at least from my point of view, embodies the ills that have consumed English. As Erin suggests, standards of excellence no longer exist in the field. Hard work, dedication, and intelligence hold no real meaning for those who belong to the profession. As a matter of fact, it seems silly to call English a profession, since the formulation of standards typically accompanies the process by which a discipline becomes professionalized and since the only things to be desired in English these days are ambiguity and complication. To put it more abrasively, good writing, thorough research, and logical argumentation have fallen by the wayside.

In fact, I think my rejected application may have been the result of my penchant for clarity, my willingness to assert what I believe, and my ability to support these beliefs clearly and persuasively. Graduate schools want risk-takers--students whose thoughts are relatively untenable and confined to the realm of incomprehensible jargon. Nevertheless, I should concede the fact that English departments continue to respect thorough research. This research, however, is essentially the equivalent of encyclopedic fact-finding. Purportedly, the larger questions that texts ask are unmanageable or have previously been answered. If that's the case, then why do we continue to study literature? What purpose does it serve us?

In my opinion, English departments need to reacquaint themselves with the larger issues that texts address. They need to emphasize the importance of debate rather than punctilious detail. The current state of scholarship ultimately diminishes both the impact of literature and the value of literary study. In other words, English must exist for English's sake--not for the sake of overpaid, chic scholars, who pusillanimously manipulate our great literary works to say the things that they, themselves, cannot.

A note to avavix:

1) NYS requires that all their teachers in primary schools have a masters degree in the subject they're teaching, along with an education degree.

2) Doubling the average salary of a teacher in Upstate NY would put their pay over $75K, more than most other public service jobs, and a lot more thna the average professional corporate job.

For all the money we're sinking into the NYS education system, children and parents certainly aren't getting their money's worth. If you really want to reform primary education I would start with the following:

1) Give principals a lot more flexibility in hiring and firing of teachers. Allow them to get rid of the non-performers.

2) Start up merit-based monetary awards, and fire/blacklist any teacher who abuses the system.

3) Allow competition with the public schools via vouchers (The "one-size-fits-all" model for education DOES NOT WORK).

4) Get a real grading system for schools that takes into account special-ed students and other factors that can skew results.

5) Lose the requirement for the education degree so that qualified people in math and science can actually teach instead of wasting their time and money getting an "education" degree.

Throwing more money at the system isn't going to work. We've been doing that for the past 30 years; what makes you think continuing to do so will somehow start working?

Are you really leaving Penn?

While I agree that the English profession had all the problems you've mentioned, I don't see how losing one tenured professor in an Ivy who understands those problems helps the overall situation.

Don't get me wrong, your personal decision is none of my business, and I say this with all due respect. I'm curious.

OK, really, I want to talk you out of it unless you know they've offered the chair at Harvard or a six-book deal or something. English will still be in the curriculum, teachers will still teach it, students will still study it.

If Penn gets to replace you with someone more fitting to their political tone, it makes the problem worse. Especially because you're young -- you could have 30 years of career there to influence students and bide your time. Theory is on the way out. You could be well-positioned to be ahead of the game if the trends shift your way -- which they may.

But again, it's none of my business, so I'll just stop here. Best.

I am a professor in the sciences at a state university. May I plead, beg, or otherwise cajole those of you thinking about the problems with English departments to take seriously the task of teaching composition and technical writing to undergraduates? Erin has hit it right on the head--no one cares about the nuts and bolts of teaching students how to write. My university does not offer a class in technical writing! How can that be? And they do not teach composition very well. I have seniors who can not write a decent paragraph. I wind up teaching technical writing skills in my upper division (and graduate) courses, and I am not the most qualified person for the job.

Please help us. Thank you.

As I will be going into graduate school this fall, I'm glad I didn't read sites such as this and IA before starting my applications. However, I'm glad I've found them since then, since I can go in with my eyes open. Despite all the problems you've enumerated, I'm still excited to be going back to school and have a chance to try and change some of these trends. I plan on being tough on my students from the very start and upholding the traditions of literature (including grammar and speeling), not the theory and politicization that apparently has universities in their grips. If everyone who is interested in fixing these problems despairs and leaves, things will be much worse, as IB Bill pointed out.

Of course, I have a built in safety net since I'm actually leaving the IT industry to go back to school. If I go through the whole process and don't make it, then I can just go back to the computer industry and be happy knowing that I at least tried. I imagine not all humanities students have other profitable skills. I know many of my friends sure don't.

Grammar, grammar, and more grammar. And a dead language. I got all the way to my freshman year in college without knowing what a participle was. My ancient greek class fixed that right away. My ability to read and write was dramatically increased when I was given the tools to analyze writing itself. I say bring back latin and/or greek at a very early age. Learning one of these languages is valuable in and of itself, but it also forces students to confront some very sophisticated grammatical concepts. Often, I think, grammar seems "boring" and "obvious" when done in one's native tongue. But it can magically become an interesting philosophical problem when grammar can help a student unpack the meaning of a sentence of Aristotle.

A nice by-product of emphasizing grammar is that it stands in opposition to critical theory. It forces the teacher and student, at least initially, to focus on what the author is saying.

(Always ready to take a simplistic approach.)

In high school we learn about nouns, verbs, past participles, the subjunctive, that sort of thing. Some even teach diagramming sentences (even though it's been wrong for years).

When we get to college, we should be learning style, rhetoric, argumentation, logical arrangement of ideas, researching topics, that sort of thing.

The problem comes from the need to study examples of good writing, which we can only do by studying good writers. Unfortunately, many of those, like Aristotle, Plato, Voltaire, &c (in English translations, naturally), deal with ideas uncomfortable to much of mainstream academia. They promote original thought, touch on ideas such as personal responibility, duty, honor, that sort of thing, much of which has fallen into disfavor.

I've got to agree with Shane: colleges do not teach composition and technical writing, and this does a serious disfavor to their graduates.

I work in the chemical industry and I spend a great deal of my time doing technical writing. I design and implement management systems, and a big part of that is to identify the processes you use and describe them clearly, for the benefit of both your own people, in house, and for outside auditors (including government officials).

I also teach technical writing within my company, because even those with graduate degrees seem to have difficulty writing well. Incomplete sentences, incorrect grammar, misuse or ignorance of punctuation - it's rare to find someone who DOESN'T have these deficiencies. And why do technical people feel the persistent need to write only in the passive voice? GGGAAAAAGHGHGH!

I have to admit that one of the best tools I have discovered for technical writing is Information Mapping (R), a method developed and marketed by a company called Information Mapping, Inc. (IMI). (They're REALLY picky about proper use of their trademark, too.) This teaches techniques useful to both writers and users.

With apologies to IMI, I will quote their advantages from their literature (I can substantiate these by first-hand experience over more than 20 years):

Greater efficiency - people trained in the method have reported at least a 10% improvement in their writing efficiency. Many have reported increases in writing productivity up to 30%.

Better organization - Writing is easier with an analytical, structured approach. More than 95% of those trained in the Information Mapping method report they spend less time debating where and how to start projects.

More appropriate documents - he Information Mapping writing standards ensure that documents contain what the user needs, where the user needs it.

Improved analysis - Finding missing dta and inconsistencies is easier. Users have erported a far more thorough analysis and a better understanding of the subject using the method.

And for users, they note the following:

Reading time - Users save 20% to 40% of their reading time because they can find the information they need quickly and they understand what they read more easily.

Fewer errors - Documentation and training materials written in this method result in fewer errors. In a recent case, using the method helped reduce errors by 30% in a vital accounting procedure.

Faster relearning - The method ensures faster relearning of forgotten material. Specific information is easy to find.

Now, I'm not promoting a specific company's product, in spite of appearances. But good technical writing is such a fundamental requirement in business and industry (and should be in academia, but I'm not going to go there at the moment), that I can't believe that it continues to be totally ignored at the college level.

Writing is something distinct from criticism, and there are different styles of writing among the disciplines. Economists consistently lock horns with their students and with the writing counselors, as the writing style of a technical paper in economics does not require the elegant variation encouraged in creative writing, let alone the elephantine structures that pass for criticism. Oh, and don't bring that theory stuff in here. We have our own.

I am one of those Graduate Assistance who teach composition at a State University. I teach two classes, one is common Freshman comp, the other, an Advanced Writer's Workshop, attempts to supplement the writing skills of those non-humanity majors.

My experience has been with freshman writing is that when its not good, its rarely because of the grammar, but rather freshman have trouble 'articulating their thoughts' and have no clue how to organize their thoughts into a persuasive manner. The fundamental problem I find is that freshman have nothing to say and therefore no reason to hone the skills with whihc to say it with. I spend much of the semester riling students up, telling that thinking for themselves is ok, and necessary to become a good writer. Once they have somethign to say, and they all eventually do once prompted enough; i focus my lessons primarily on organization and writing specifically rather than abstractly. I make my students write for fifteen minutes everyday and grade these statements based on their ability to specific, relate examples to a whole, etc. Eventually by the end of the semester, we hone the professional skills, like grammar, syntax, MLA, etc.

But these skills don't matter without, first, the desire to articulate, and second, an organizing method in which to articulate, the actual skills of articulation are last in sense.

My sense is that too much attention has been paid to the nitty-gritty, without acknowledging the conceptual. Every university student has had many courses in grammar--but why don't they know it? Because they've never personally felt the need to know it beyond getting the grade for the particular grammar course.

In my course for upperclassman, i have them actually interview professionals in their field and ask them about writing; once they complete these interviews, they are more willing to learn the technical side of writing, because they finally find out they need it.

The technical skills are being taught in universities and public schools, however, to uninterested student population. They need these skills, not to begin with, but after the fact--after they realize its important to be clearly understood. And that comes with maturity, so it makes less sense to teach grammar to freshman, as oppossed to upperclassman. If you give them the 'will', they will find a way to learn the rules, but not until then.

------

DC makes a good point that literary studies need to reevaluate their role within the academia, society etc. Afterall, literary studies, is derived from teh term literature, which seems to be suggest something 'important'--that nobody talks about anymore, the actual importantness of our study.

I wonder, though, how many literature students, professors, etc, actually pick up a variety of Literary Journals and read them...how many are actually out to find literature--i imagine few. More writing is happening now in our history then ever before, but seemingly fewer and fewer eyes to look at it...if literary studies wants new prominence within the social and academic spheres, it should lose much the classical studies (the Canon) and focus on whats being written now, or even the last thirty years (other than theory for cripes sake).

I admire your decision to leave academe. I read your blog faithfully every day. I do feel very sad, though, to hear that you're leaving. I'm sure that the decision was wrenching for you.

I hope that this doesn't mean that Critical Mass will end its run! What will I do without my daily dose of fair-minded musings on academe? It's better than caffeine, I tell you!

Some random thoughts...

1)In both high school and college, it's the English classes that I remember most vividly. To the extent that the issues Erin mentioned are destroying the effective teaching of English, I think students are missing out on something very important.

2)I'm not convinced there is such a discipline as "technical writing." Why wouldn't a person with good *general* writing skills also be able to do technical writing?

3)Grammar...I'm not sure that learning formal grammar *in one's own language* is helpful. It comes across as an artificial approach to what should be done naturally...kind of like taking kissing lessons. Perhaps the best way to understand formal grammer (diagramming sentences, etc) is in the context of learning a foreign language..then you would understand why you need it.

4)Maybe the concept of "rhetoric" needs to be reintroduced...ie, the framing and analysis of arguments. I don't think this exists in most current college curricula except in formal logic classes in the math department (far too esoteric for most people), certain philosophy classes (ditto), and policy debate programs (in which the structure of arguments has often become rather bizarre, to say the least). Maybe English departments could play a useful role here.

Great comments, everyone, and thanks for the words of encouragement. I'm not in a position yet to say where I will be next year, but I will say that the decision to leave academe does not have to mean leaving teaching, and it won't mean that for me.

I'm not looking elsewhere because I have given up on teaching English. I'm looking elsewhere because I believe so strongly in teaching English. Too many kids go to college without solid writing skills, without knowledge of grammar, without training in reasoned analysis, and without solid grounding in literary history. The scattershot structure of collegiate humanities coursework then virtually guarantees that they will not acquire those skills while in college. Most composition courses are worthless. And English majors will tell you that it is the rare teacher indeed who bothers to make any substantive comment at all on their writing. You see the results of this non-system as students pass through your classes. You do what you can in a thirteen week semester to deliver information, to teach some skills, and to provide what is for many students the first serious commentary they have ever received on their writing. You do what you can. But the lack of continuity in student coursework and the absence of institutional accountability to students ensure that you just can't do very much.

There are other settings where I can do much more. The decision to leave academe is a decision not to abandon education, but to commit to it that much more fully. When and if I have more specific news about future plans, I'll post it on Critical Mass.

In the meantime, the grammar bitch in me must speak: Noah, dude, proofread your comments before posting them!

What an interesting series of posts! I cannot but help thinking that while I agree with the general premise of these musings, I find them oddly amusing and frustrating, for two reasons.

First, there is a field of English studies, largely ignored at places like Penn and other "elite" institutions and often belittled and misunderstood by my English studies colleagues who specialize in literature, called "composition and rhetoric." In my opinion, the general point of this discipline is to investigate an ethical approach to the teaching of English.

The things that people in this field investigate, ponder, write about, talk about, and teach are all of the things on Erin's manifesto. Right now, the field's main conference, the Conference on College Composition and Communication, is going on in San Antonio-- see http://www.ncte.org/profdev/conv/cccc04 for details. This conference attracts around 3,000 folks each year, and this is the 55th year of the convention, the 55th year that writing and rhetoric teachers from all over the country have come together to talk about writing instruction, the problematic status of disenfranchised instructors, connecting the K-12 experiences with higher ed, grading, finding ways to value teaching, and so forth. Readers might be interested to know that the cfp for next year's conference is available (see http://www.ncte.org/announce/116107.htm ). Might I also suggest that concerned readers visit the web site for the National Council of Teachers of English, http://www.ncte.org, which has a host of materials on the teaching of English at all levels.

I don't want to suggest that us composition and rhetoric folks have the answers. Who does? But I do want to suggest that there is field of study dedicated to investigating the questions and attempting solutions. These are not things that are simply being ignored by everyone in English departments. Those of you who are also interested in these questions and attempted solutions might want to look into the field's scholarship further. See, for example, the journals College Composition and Communication, College English,, Research in the Teaching of English,, English Journal, and/or Computers and Composition, just to name a few.

Second, I am sorry to say that the "sad state of affairs" of higher education in regards to the abilities (or lack thereof) of our students to write isn't a recent phenomenon. Indeed, the list that Erin posts could have very easily been posted 100, even 200, years ago. Alas, the youth are always in state of crisis, and the teaching of English-- particularly the teaching of writing-- has similarly always been in crisis. I don't have time to offer much of a bibliography with this entry, but see the works of such writers as the late Jim Berlin, Sharon Crowley, Susan Miller, Stephen North, and Nan Johnson, just to name a few writers who come to mind. These people have excellent book-length works that discuss the history of writing instruction and the discipline of composition and rhetoric in interesting and lucid ways.

"In high school we learn about nouns, verbs, past participles, the subjunctive, that sort of thing. Some even teach diagramming sentences (even though it's been wrong for years)."

In High School? This isn't really on topic--re: English programs at Uni--but I'd think that middle school and elementary school are the appropriate times to learn the mechanics of grammar, as well as paragraph organisation and the like. Once one reaches High School, one ought to be able to write a simple essay--there, the focus should be on style and clarity. By college, this should all be old-hat, and the focus should be on substance.

I know that's not the way it is, but I think that's the way it ought to be. Colleges ought to require a sort of sample of work (a five page essay, say, topic chosen from a set) to ensure that students entering can write adequately well. If entrance test-prep were to include, of necessity, formal composition (in, yes, the 18th-19th century style; Gibbon's prose is my ideal-haha), then the private test-prep services would, in short order, figure out *how* it can be taught to students. These pedagogical techniques and perhaps even the proficient teaching base created thereby could then be transferred to public high schools.

Just a quick post to answer david foster's (lack of capitals due to author's apparent preference, not my lack of knowledge of the location of the CAPs key) question about 'technical writing'...

david, technical writing is different from creative writing in several areas. The purpose of technical writing is to convey information; some examples include product brochures, training manuals, reference texts, job instructions, etc. A primary purpose is clarity; therefore, repetition of not only particular phrases but of sentence structure is encouraged. Also, conciseness is also valued. Simple, clear sentences are preferred, with repetitive use of the same terms or descriptors. The goal is to impart information clearly and preferably also efficiently to a target audience.

Creative writing, on the other, encourages one to show one's entire knowledge of the various ways in which sentences can be created and combined. Compound sentences, variable and creative adjectives and descriptors are expected. Capture the reader's imagination, and draw him into the writing emotionally. The purpose may be entertainment, persuasion to the writer's point of view, intellectual stimulation, etc., none of which may be harmed by the variety and creativity of the sentence and paragraph style.

In order to do technical writing, I had to unlearn much of what I was taught in creative writing and English classes. It is a different skill set and is directed to a different kind of audience. However, if one is well-versed in creative writing, then adapting to technical writing is not difficult. The problem I have found is the total lack of writing and grammatical construction skills overall in persons who were supposed to have learned this through more than a decade of formal schooling.

Claire..yes, I know that you want to use a different style when writing an instruction manual than if you're writing essays or fiction (though some brochures would fall neatly into the latter category). But I think anyone who has good *general* writing experience should be able to transition fairly easily to writing documents such as these, which I guess is also consistent with what you're saying. My broader point is that universities really don't need specialized "technical writing" programs--just teach 'em how to write--whatever the subject--and things will work out fine.

Brochures and ad copy are, to my mind, very different from instruction manuals, and aren't usually considered "technical writing" in anyplace I've encountered. Here again, good general writing skills will hold someone in good stead, but there's a little more case to be made for also having specialized courses.

"...just teach 'em how to write--whatever the subject--and things will work out fine."

I agree. But it's the "just teach 'em how to write" part that is so very complicated. It's possible today for students to graduate from Ivy League universities without having a clear command of grammar--without knowing something is or is not a sentence fragment, without knowing how to use a semi-colon, without understanding what a participle is let alone how to keep one from dangling, and so on. It's possible for people to graduate from Ivy League universities with majors in English and not know these things.

Why? It's partly because college teachers aren't consistently and collectively doing that part of their job. But, far more basically, it's because many of these kids' English teachers never did that part of their job. Increasingly, I think it's a mistake to suggest that writing can be "taught" in college--not just because the single-semester freshman comp courses that most schools offer are cosmetic substitutes for the substantive, thoroughgoing training that ought to be part of every college course, but because such courses offer too little too late to too many people. These courses exist because on some level schools recognize that most undergraduates arrive at college in need of remediation when it comes to writing. But they simply cannot do in a matter of weeks what ought previously to have been done over a period of years. Instead, they mask the problem by pretending to alleviate it--the mere existence of freshman comp programs creates the illusion that something called "college-level writing" can indeed be learned in a couple of months. Anyone who is serious about writing as a craft--or anyone who has ever taught freshman comp--knows that this is simply not true.

The deplorable writing skills of so many undergrads can be best addressed through prevention, by which I mean pre-college writing instruction sustained over a period of years that actually teaches students to express themselves clearly and forcefully in correct English. The reason so many college students can't do this is because nobody ever expected it of them when they were younger, and so never taught them. The degree of disrespect, not to mention neglect, involved in that is astonishing. I am increasingly convinced that the best time to address the problem we see so starkly in college students today is before they get to college. The strongest students I see are the ones who bring skills with them to college. Those who don't come in with them have a tough struggle to acquire them while there, and often don't.

Just a quick question, since we're on the subject of undergraduate-level English classes. I took a class called "Advanced Exposition" last semester, and was quite puzzled by many of the assigned readings. Namely, they made no sense!

I'd come to class the next day and the other students would gush, "Isn't that so profound, where he talks about that Dutch painter on page sixty?" And the teacher would nod and add, "Yes, doesn't that remind you of what we read on page thirty-five where he talks about [insert some subject that is, to my mind, completely unrelated]." And the rest of the class would agree whole-heartedly.

Meanwhile I'd be sitting there wondering what in the world they were talking about. Did I simply not "get it"? Or does the Emperor really have no clothes here?

For example, we studied Paulo Friere's "The 'Banking' Concept of Education". From what I can tell, he's advocating that the student and the teacher have equal authority in the classroom. Because we all know that kindergarteners don't need an authority figure telling them what to do; they behave themselves fine if left to do as they please... @.@

John Berger's "Ways of Seeing" likewise puzzled me. Okay, I get that everyone has biases that influence the way they look at art, literature, the world, etc. I got that in the first three paragraphs. So what's the rest of the essay about? I'm still trying to figure that out. Our professor said he was an art historian, and thus we couldn't hold him to the same literary standards as we would a professional author. @.@ What are we doing studying him in a class on descriptive writing, then?

Walter Benjamins' "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" and Michael Foucault's "Panopticism" likewise confused me. Didn't anyone ever mention to these guys that they're getting paid to be *comprehensible*, not to set some sort of world record for Most Words over Four Syllables in One Essay? Or are they really, truly being paid to be as cryptic as possible?

I was also kind of upset how one-sided all of the essays were. For example, we read an essay by Edward Said describing Palestine -- and nothing by an Israeli author with the other side of the story. At least I got out of reading Noam Chomsky...

Erin..just to clarify, when I said "just teach 'em how to write," I didn't mean to imply that such teaching was easy, though using the word "just" probably implied that...only that there is no need for specialized "technical writing" programs, which would probably detract from mainline efforts to teach English properly. You're probably right that it is very difficult to teach writing by the time someone arrives in college if they don't already have a decent level of skills.

David,

Thanks for the clarification. I've got mixed feelings about the technical writing issue. On a purely pedagogical level, I agree that technical writing courses should not be a substitute for mastering more general writing skills. On a practical level, my thinking runs differently. I think about all the undergrads who major in English with no real plan for what they will do with that degree once they graduate, I think of how English departments collude in that thoughtlessness by focussing on attracting ever more majors (often by dumbing down the major and by--unofficially of course--becoming known as places where the A's are easy and the work is neglectable), and I ask myself whether English departments might not make more of an effort to offer courses that draw practical bridges between the concentrated study of literature and the world of work that lies beyond. One way to do this would be to offer courses in "saleable" writing of various kinds. If creative writing courses are cool, why not technical writing, too? My fantasy English department would not only do that sort of thing, but would offer some basic teacher training (and tie that to some sort of hands-on internship), some training in professional editing techniques (and facilitate internships in that), and even courses on web-based publishing and other emerging "literary" technologies. You could argue that I'm trying to turn the liberal arts degree into technical training. But you could also argue that I'm asking English departments to think harder about what their responsibilities are to their majors, and to make sure that their majors graduate with actual marketable skills. For the six figure fee so many pay for their degree these days, that seems like a reasonable thing to ask.

I agree with Mike above who says bring back Latin and Greek. The two of them have probably been the parts of my education that developed my mind in ways I've continued to use. I'm a lot better at writing computer programs for having studied them, for instance.

I may relate the current Dartmouth Alumni Mag article on Dartmouth's grade inflation to this post as well.

Kacie,
Benjamin and Focoult (sp?) wrote in languages other than English. I don't read French but a friend who does says Focoult and the rest are actually much clearer in the original than they are in English.

Noah says, "My experience has been with freshman writing is that when its not good, its rarely because of the grammar, but rather freshman have trouble 'articulating their thoughts' and have no clue how to organize their thoughts into a persuasive manner."

I had a 10th grade English teacher who spent 6 weeks teaching us how to write a paragraph, and who was death on random, formless verbiage. Noah's right, that you have to have organization in your thoughts before you can write. My daughter (11th grade) can be horribly vague sometimes when I quiz her to help her study before tests. "The thingy ... uh ... fits in the thingy ... and ... yeah." She kind of knows what she means but I tell her "sloppy language leads to sloppy thinking" and vice-versa. I wish she'd had Miss Atkison last year.

If I'm not misunderstanding the second comment, it's is implying that it's the duty of English professors to stop, or at least slow down, English's evolution.

This is riduculous. As long as there are speakers of English, it will continue to change; this is the nature of *all* living languages. The only way that it would be possible to stop English from changing would be to prevent people from using it, and I highly doubt that's the goal of any English major.

Composition studies has been discussing the historical role of writing instruction and those who teach it for, well, a very long time. I'm always surprised when the rest of English studies 'discovers' the issue. Look at nearly 50 years worth of College English, CCC, JAC, Susan Miller's Textual Carnivals, Sharon Crowley's Composition and the University, John Brereton's account of the Harvard writing program, and a host of others. The research is there, you just need to tap into it...