Kozlowski: Writing proficiency deserves more attention

The English language can boast of an enviable quantity of great literature. From Chaucer to… The English language can boast of an enviable quantity of great literature. From Chaucer to Shakespeare to Thomas Paine to Mark Twain to Hemingway to Wole Soyinka, some of the great novelists, playwrights and essayists have written in English.

Granted, few people in Chaucer’s day were able to write, let alone write well. However, in modern times we have come to expect a certain proficiency in writing, yet appear unable to train kids to meet those expectations. Recently, I had the opportunity to read five essays being graded by a fellow debate tournament judge. What I saw was discouraging.

I saw arguments without evidence, evidence without argument, astonishing extrapolation from limited evidence, muddled organization, wordiness, typos, incorrect use of apostrophes … I would have been overjoyed to find something as reassuring as a mere split infinitive.

One essay brought out the standard arguments against gun control, and it was an excellent essay for the first page and a half. There was plenty of evidence, including some I hadn’t heard before, meaning the paper was at least somewhat researched. The middle of the second page was still satisfactory, stating that the founding fathers intended private ownership of firearms to be a safeguard against government tyranny. But then the essayist implied that such tyranny is already occurring in San Francisco and New York, and folks need guns to protect themselves from the police right now.

Next was an essay by a strikingly pro-Obama writer who attempted satire but only succeeded in writing a tirade against anything and everything. The sarcasm was searing, chronic, annoying and ineffective.

Another essay talked about racial profiling and how it led to problems like stereotyping and, apparently, mass violence. The best-written essay was by an animal-rights activist in training. However, the evidence used was almost exclusively from groups such as PETA, which could be dismissed as a biased source.

The kicker is, high school seniors wrote these essays. This was perhaps some of the best writing these kids would ever produce.

In 2008 it was estimated that only a quarter of high school students were able to write proficiently, according to The New York Times. Yes, some people said the test used for the estimate wasn’t a great measure of writing aptitude, but still, any vaguely legitimate test of 28,000 subjects that shows 75 percent of students can’t write has to get us to sit up and pay attention. Other indicators clearly show student writing is in an unnerving state: state governments spend an estimated $250 million annually on remedial writing courses for state workers, according to Child Trends DataBank. This figure doesn’t even include what private firms spend.

Writing well is vital for communication, even in an era when “LOL or G2G” constitutes an entire paragraph. Proper communication is essential in the workplace or even finding a workplace. However, poor writing is also a symptom of something else. If you write a paragraph containing a non sequitur, an oxymoron and a wild generalization and see nothing wrong, then you haven’t been trained to think. If your organization is nonexistent, then your thinking is likely not organized.

If students are unable to analyze and summarize their own arguments, what hope do we have that they will be able to do any better with the arguments of others? This inability to work with arguments could have grave consequences for our nation. If the electorate is unable to tell the difference between sweet reason and sour B.S., elections degenerate into dog-and-pony shows, where the brain of a politician is less important than the hair that crowns it.

This problem has to be addressed, but doing so requires the achievement of goals that are hard to define. What does “proficient” mean? Setting arbitrary benchmarks like “the passive voice will be avoided by students by the 8th grade” risks a lack of emphasis on the fundamentals of good sentences, logical paragraphs and careful reasoning. Teaching somebody calculus when he doesn’t know arithmetic makes no sense. Similarly, teaching a writing trick like parallel structure makes no sense if someone doesn’t know how to write a quality sentence.

Solving the problem will require a greater emphasis on writing, especially fundamental concepts like sentence and paragraph structure. Further emphasis should be on the reading and analysis of good prose. One exercise I found quite helpful in 11th grade was a weekly assignment to pick apart an op-ed piece in The New York Times. If you know what good writing is, you’re halfway there. We need to counter the silent epidemic of poor writing, so that everyone will be able to write, not just a select few writers of great literature.

Write Kozthought@gmail.com.