Writing Skills of Little Ones

Today my dad sent me an excerpt from a blog he reads from time to time by Kevin Drum (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2007_06/011426.php):

Here are some excerpts:

“IS THE PEN NO LONGER MIGHTIER THAN THE SWORD?….Old farts are forever complaining that kids aren’t as well educated today as they used to be. I think Plato felt that way about Aristotle, and it’s been all downhill since then.

“… I have to say that an awful lot of people I trust have been telling me this lately, and in no uncertain terms. Yesterday, for example, both Mark Kleiman and my brother were pretty adamant about the almost complete lack of writing skills displayed by contemporary college students. The kids are as smart as they used to be, and their math skills are OK, but they can’t write worth a damn. They can’t write papers, they can’t write paragraphs, they can’t even write coherent sentences.

“Is this true? Or just a case of old-fartism? I realize this isn’t exactly a scientific survey or anything, but I’m curious to know what teachers at various levels think of this. I know plenty of them read the blog, so comment away. Is writing really a lost art?”

I am only a recent college grad and even I complain about the general intelligence of college kids, actually all kids, and lament that they can’t write for poo. It’s true that every generation thinks the younger ones are frighteningly dumb. But usually things turn out okay because, with guidance, most kids grow out of their idiocy and go on to become upstanding and at least mildly intelligent adults who feel the same away about the new younger generations. That said, I do think this problem with writing is very real.

Excellent writing is a skill that most people simply don’t have, which is what makes wonderful writing just that. But I think even my generation, in general, has far better authors than those below us, and I attribute this in part to the fact that we were older and had already learned the basic rules of writing when online jargon, chatting, and blogs came on to the scene. My friends and I, for example, might sound like your average idiot girls when we talk about petty, superficial, or mundane things among ourselves (although in the moment we no doubt think we are geniuses), but we know how to abandon that habit and turn to real English when we take the pen to the paper or our fingers to the keyboard.

Every generation will surely have some inherently marvelous writers, just as they will have some inherently awful writers.  But I would bet a large sum of money that today’s technology-drowned kids who are “inherently” good writers will have some things in common that separate them from their peers: they probably read real books, use real dictionaries, and have a real interest in words. These are interests that are universal in the world of intelligence and writing, no matter what generation you’re from.

That, to me, is where today we find big problems with young writers. Those interests in the art of words and in the English language and in real books seem to be slowly disappearing. Now, kids are exposed to online speak (which keeps getting worse- it wasn’t nearly so incoherent when I was in middle school) while trying to learn real English in school- and we all know that peers and the social activities have an effect as big as the classroom, if not bigger, on a child’s development. I would imagine that when a kid learns both real language and arguably cryptic popular language at the same time, it becomes difficult to separate them in certain situations. After all, people that grow up speaking multiple languages frequently interchange the two (or more) and sometimes have difficulty reconciling them, so why would popular vernacular and standard English be any different?

On the other hand, these grievances beg the question: is it really that bad, or do we just see more now that we have better technology? I’ve read studies that show much higher rates of breast cancer in rich, well-educated communities. More often than not, these studies show that this isn’t because there is some genetic factor in these areas or a cancer-causing toxin in their water, rather it’s because women in those groups tend to have their breasts checked more frequently (they are more educated about health risks and they have more access to medical care), therefore more cases of breast cancer are caught. Have kids’ writing skills really gotten so much worse? Or do we just catch more errors because we have the Internet and see too many examples of bad writing?

Unfortunately, I think both are true. On some levels the problem may seem worse than it really is because we are over-exposed to moronism via the Internet, while in the past, bad papers by flailing students were thrown in the trash or at least kept away from fragile eyes. But I also think the writing of American youth has hit a ghastly low. And the fact that our little ones use the Internet so frequently means that they’re not necessarily getting any help, because those that might otherwise be mediocre or even good writers are constantly bogged down by awful spelling, bad grammar, confusing syntax, and general stupidity, until they don’t even realize that what they’re reading is garbage.

The Internet, however, is the only one to blame. To indict the Internet for all its bad writing would be like blaming an obese 4-year-old for her weight because she eats the Cheetos her parents give her. The Internet is not the root cause of bad writing; it perpetuates it. In fact, good writing on the Internet abounds- in online newspapers, magazines, professional websites, and blogs by people who actually know how to write. Technology is not a bad thing, but it starts to look like a bad thing when the our education systems can’t adapt their curriculum. We need to teach kids to appreciate and use the good things about technology, and how to identify and reject the bad things. I don’t imagine there are very many teachers that give out worksheets featuring excerpts from badly written online blogs or publications, and make kids find what’s wrong and learn what’s right, but they should. As text-message spelling, lazy grammar and IM sentence structure become the norm, teachers should give students a balance by teaching them what’s wrong with those things and making sure they can recognize how they’re different from real English.

I’ve read complaints by journalists who believe that part of the downfall of writing is that with the Internet, the need for good writers is diminishing because anyone with a computer can be a “writer”. That may seem like the case, due to the advent of pseudo-journalism and the blogosphere, but I don’t think we have to worry about that quite yet. As Jack Hart, author of the book I just finished, “A Writer’s Coach”, points out: writing skills aren’t only used in magazines or in books, and they aren’t just about flowery language. A job applicant who can write a compelling letter and a creative resume gets the job. The sales executive who writes the best marketing strategy gets the account, or maybe a bonus. Lots of crappy blogs have followers because their readers can identify a core of good ideas; think of how many more readers they could gain if they learned how to write.

Writing has the ability to articulate a point, and to be edited to do so even better, in a way that the spoken word cannot. Every time I write one of these posts, I change things twenty times before “publishing” it. And I go back days, weeks, months later to make more changes. In daily conversation, we can’t go back and edit something we said to make ourselves better understood, no matter how much we’d like to. With writing we can. And words spoken in front of an audience- speeches, TV shows, plays, news- are all coming from a piece of paper with words on it anyway. Trends in medium may shift with time and with more inventive technology, but the written word still has power. Writing is in no danger, until we learn to communicate exact ideas and images telepathically or through microchips implanted in our brains, of becoming obsolete.

It does appear that students’ writing is going downhill. But even if we are just old farts and are hallucinating the bad writing, we should still try to save the craft. Because if teachers and parents didn’t worry that “kids these days aren’t as smart as they used to be”, and thought that kids were fine and smart and on their way to becoming geniuses all on their own, then there would be no reason to passionately teach them the wonderful world of writing. And reading, and math, and science, and history, and all the other subjects. Our well-adjusted or at least mildly intelligent adults would disappear, replaced by the socially inept simpletons we always fear today’s youth will become.