Freelance Review

By: William Harris Prof. Em. Middlebury College

This last century has been remarkable in many ways. It sprouted a whole new range of Dewey-inspired disciplines in the Social Sciences, it hurled us from the first tentative definition of the electron in 1904 to an electronic world which Prof. W. Wilson of Princeton could hardly have imagined. It gave us tools and techniques we now consider absolutely necessary for civilized life, but it also gave us a long list of regrets, verging often on a wish for the simplicity of the “old days”, which really never existed except in our imagination.

Two losses, which we began to feel acutely when the century was two thirds gone, were the disappearing ability of most people to do arithmetic mentally or even with a pencil, but the calculator made it all right for us after a fashion. The other loss is serious and there is no device or program to set it right again. I am speaking about the loss of the ability to write clear and understandable English. I would like to trace in very rough outline the course of the century in regard to this situation:

1895. Dean Briggs at Harvard decided that American education, which was based on the intensive study of Greek and Latin as Core Materials, was insufficient for a Harvard education, and introduced a radical new course required of all Freshman. This involved reading examples of well wrought English, and regular writing of papers or “themes”. This was listed in the course catalog as “English A”, and the course swept the country like wildfire, thus opening the gates for the undergraduate study of English Literature as both a reading and writing discipline.

1925. The new emphasis on the Social Studies involved a great deal of discussion and consideration of the radically new and innovative concepts. Whether it was Economics, Sociology or Psychology, there were new opinions to be voiced, and the student was expected to write coherent accounts of thinking and reading in well manicured, typed papers with detailed footnotes. Typing lessons were everywhere and “student papers” began to look like serious articles, which many of them became as the student proceeded through graduate school.

1950 By mid-century the rule of the “red pencil” was firmly established, papers were marked up with such energy that often the original text was at times hardly visible. This could summit in the rigorous system of “Outlining the Sentence”, or it could be merely crossing out words and phrases and waiting for the student to submit acceptable copy. Small writing in the margins covered content, while the red pencil went to the heart of the matter.

l970 Here a new spirit entered the world of high school education, one which we have not yet identified as the enemy within. “Educators” with at times questionable degrees and little experience in the field, stated that “Rote Learning was the Death of the Mind”, and urged teachers to stress learning about things, rather than learning things. These few words are so simple but insidious, that I had better go back and make them clearer: “LEARNING ABOUT THINGS, vs. learning things.”

l975 Teachers began to read their student papers in terms of “content”, which is laudable, but they decided that correcting mistakes in the writing might damp the student’s enthusiasm, even make writing a frightening experience. So they stopped “correcting” papers, with an educational excuse first, but with the net effect of saving the teacher a lot of time and work with the red pencil. I know a specific case where the student in Junior High asked his teacher to correct his writing in detail, but the teacher said he could not do this for him or he would have to do for everybody. A complaint to the principal brought no action and the student went through High School with no corrections on his written papers. I know from my college teaching that reading papers only for “content” had become common by l980, actually standard by l985, and the only detailed corrections offered were in college Freshman “remedial” writing seminars, which were too thin by then and of course far too late.

l980 This new wave of Educational Reform ignored the fact that arithmetic must be learned by rote and if you don’t learn it early, you will be unable to make change in the supermarket when you re working your way through college. And what about the number of days in the months……? Let alone being ignorant of the end of the Civil War, and whether if came before 1776 or not. Look at a History SAT exam now, and you see the result: The study of history is a game of guessing likelihoods, ruling out worst-answers to find the right one by subtraction. We know all about the SAT’s now, their tests and ETS-Biz are being scrutinized at last. But in the rush to the new rule, we applied anti-rote thinking to the writing of English, with results which we at last begin to deplore.

1985 With the appearance of SpellChecks on the new wave of computers, along with rather questionable Grammar Checkers, some people felt that the worst of the writing problem was being faced and the situation well in hand. But writing didn’t get better. It is true that gross spelling errors did get caught, but there is no way to make up for years of inattention with a quick course, or with a snappy new device. You have to “learn” how to write well, and that takes time, like the learning curve from arithmetic through geometry into algebra with all firmly in hand before you can hope to get through the calculus.

l990+ In my last year of college teaching, I and another teacher did a course in writing for just four senior students who had all done well enough in college, but knew their writing skills were weak. By intensive labor we re-did some of the work which should have been done over the course of many years, we tore apart their written papers word by word, often spending an hour on a page, tracking down every word and phrase for the best clarity, style and conveying of meaning. When the students took apart some of our printed papers, we knew they were on the right track. At the end they assured us that although they hadn’t learned everything they needed to know, they had learned how to look at their writing critically, and felt from there on they would be able to float alone. Q.E.D.

l950 looking backward! In my first teaching position in a small college in the West, I had one section of Freshman English along with my other work. I assigned a one or two page paper to be brought in Tuesday and Thursday with no excuses, and spent my Sunday afternoons with the pencil correcting some sixty pages of student writing. Few typed, so each student had to write out a new corrected copy to go to me along with the new piece. Of course some of the students complained to the Dean, and the Chairman of English , who never corrected anything, hoped to get me fired. I persisted and soon everyone realized how well my students were writing after two terms on this regimen. I would have said then that there was no other way to get the job done.

Back to 2000 again! But now there are some ways to get it done, with the aid of new technologies which we all have at our hands. There is little excuse anymoreto ignore spelling and grammar problems, other than from a leaning toward laziness. If Typing was the invention of the l930’s in the schools, the use of the computer Keyboard is even more a necessity in the new century, not only for writing notes and themes, but for most jobs. So the previous handwritten “paper” is now composed on a computer and since it is electronic format, it can be reviewed by the teacher with far more accuracy in much less time. But many teachers will still like the feel of a paper printout, which gives those wide margins so suitable for the traditional cramped and snippy little remarks which most students will never read. “Good idea here….but have you read Tyler’s new book?” “I like this but you could have gone further…” “Good idea but no reference…?” Or the traditional: “I like this…….” which merely indicates that the Prof. has read through the paper rather than rubber-stamping the grade at the top.

For the New Century:

It is time to go back to the rigorous days of the last generation of high school and college teachers , the “Wielders of the Red Pencil” and the eagle-eyed searchers for micro- discrepant detail. We can now do it much more effectively than they did, with the aid of our new computer technology. I have several suggestions:

First, require a 3 page paper each week, due Friday with no excuses about a grandmother’s recurrent death. This is submitted in electronic format, inserted in a folder which contains that week’s writing from the class. Unless there is an objection, all students should be able to see each others writing, especially in the corrected versions. Isn’t learning from your peers part of the American system of education?

Second, the teacher pulls up the student’s paper on screen, and start to edit. I have used the following system and find it easy and effective with standard KB keystrokes:

    a) For a word misspelled or wrongly used in the context, highlight it and make it bold.

    b) For bad grammar, in any of its infinite varieties, make it underlined .

    c) For something which is stylistically inept or just plain unclear without being technically wrong, use the italics

    d)Then draw a line across the page ———————- below which you can write a note about the corrections, and ideas about improving style, suggests of all sorts. I think that a computer “mini e-mail” of this sort is more personal than a penciled word or two of advice, since it can be easily expanded if there is something pertinent to be said.

    e)But then the student must correct the paper and turn it in as a new copy, which is so easy to do electronically that there is no excuse at all for ignoring this stage. If the corrections are minor and local, the page can be corrected on screen just as it stands by deleting and substituting. But if there are more corrections, it would be a good practice to Copy/Paste the corrected paper down to a place right below the original, and then go about the corrections and improvements on a new copy. When that copy is brought up the best that the student thinks possible, it can be highited entire and reformatted to BOLD, as a way of signaling that the correction is done and this is the new copy for the teacher to read. For the teacher this is not only a sign for WorkDone, but also easier to read in the bold font.

A FINAL WORD:
We have been complaining and recently whining about the deplorable state of our students’ writing abilities. Enough if this! We haven’t been making much headway with our complaints. But there is something very valuable in the American character which can be summed up in the words : NEVER GIVE UP!

We have been through fires, earthquakes, Depressions and more Wars than we like to recount, but we have never lost sight of the idea of things getting fixed. Improvement is part of what we are about nationally, we have been successful in almost every area we have committed ourselves to, and I am sure the “Crisis of Writing” is the next item on the firing-line. Something has to be done, and the people who have to get it done are you teachers who are reading this paper on your computer screen. There are three components involved here, all within your power:

1) Get rigorous with student writing assignments, get the students to flow out several pages a week, without fail.

2) Get rigorous with your electronic substitute for the red pencil. You can now do that work in a quarter of the time it used to take, no more long Sunday afternoons and evenings with piles of paper to be carried back and forth. If you and your students don’t have computers available and network connections, go out and get them. The schools do have money if you talk out and make your needs clear.

3) Set a standard for each student in terms of what you believe that student’s ultimate capacity is. Press on hard for excellence, for the kind of writing which will later make the student a desirable employee, a literate and coherent scientist, and perhaps even a teacher like yourself sitting before a computer handing on to the next generation the lessons which your students are now learning from you.