Three on English

"Failure to communicate: The inability of many students to write clear, cogent sentences has costly implications for the digital age".

When you teach English to college students, you quickly realize two things.

First, many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.

The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.

"Do You Speak College Slang?"

Eble—an English professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill—was kind enough to share her latest slang list with me. She’s been collecting such lists of “good, current campus slang” since 1972 in her undergraduate English classes. The lists are not just about collecting new slang, but about seeing what older slang is still in use, so I wasn’t surprised to find familiar terms like “absofreakinlutely,” “alrighty,” “blow off,” “craptastic,” “food coma,” “hammered,” “hook up,” “preggers,” “splitsville,” and “tramp stamp.” Though slang has a reputation for being ephemeral, some terms do stick around for decades—look at what a run “cool” has had.

"Perversely in praise of the passive voice".

Most of what you've heard about the passive voice is true: It's wordy, weaselly, and wimpy. Much academic writing, in particular, would benefit from recasting into the active voice. Some scholars are evidently fearful of sounding too lively and perhaps actually being read.

But occasionally the passive voice can be useful

Comments

[david foster]

"costly implications for the digital age" and "In an increasingly digital world, writing acts as a vehicle for knowledge"

Why would writing be more important in a "digital age" than in any other sort of age? And if the writer knew what "digital" actually means, she would recognize that writing is inherently digital.

I certainly agree with the importance of teaching students to write well, but this obsession with tying everything to some sort of "in our modern, streamlined age" meme is itself a kind of bad writing.

[Bill Towne]

I don't have to grade English papers (thankfully), but I was thinking that 20 minutes per paper would take your average high school teacher (35 * 5 * 1/3) = 58 hours 20 minutes to grade one set. Even spending four hours at home every night after school (including weekends) would take them two weeks to get through their papers.

If we're serious about wanting kids to learn to write, we probably need to give teachers more time to grade. Maybe in urban areas where there are universities around, they could get college English students to help with this. Then again, I'm not convinced that the kids have to sit through six hours of class each day...why not have English two or three times a week and give the teachers time off as long as they are giving much better feedback on the papers that they grade?

[jorgxmckie]

I routinely take 15-20 minutes to grade 4-5 page undergraduate writings. This semester I will grade approximately 185 such papers [and I have two grad classes with extensive writing, but which are generally easier to grade]. At the low end, I will, indeed, spend around 50 hours just grading these papers. Trust me, that's the amount of time it takes.

I have them email .rtf files, and I grade them in Word 2007, for legibility.

I have a set of "Paper Rules" to make their task [and mine] easier. One of these is that I prefer 15-word sentences. "If you have a 16-word sentence, re-write it as two 15-word sentences if you must."

I have had a rather large number of students tell me later that learning to write that way has been very beneficial in their professional lives.

[jorgxmckie]

Oh, and I think the author misses the derivation of "fubarose". Anyone who has been in the military knows "FUBAR" as Effed Up Beyond All Reason.

[jorgxmckie]

Upon re-reading the article, probably the author does know the derivation and was just being careful, but in that case, why mention it at all?