Shaughnessy's Errors and Expectations

As I read Shaughnessy again for this blog entry, I got angry. How could a school system allow students to graduate high school without the ability to pluralize nouns? My eight-year-old can do that. It seems like a terrible injustice to me that students can be so ill-served by public education that they have to wait until college to master such fundamental skills. Doubling the injustice is that so many of these students are from underserved, minority backgrounds. I'm puzzled as to why this isn't considered a civil rights issue.

Triply unjust now is that many of these students believe that the only way they can succeed is by entering a college that is not well prepared to receive them. (A college that doesn't have the SEEK program like CUNY of Shaugnessy's day) Then they take massive loans that can never be discharged, then they drop out of school because they are so inadequately prepared and inadequately taught. So now they are uneducated and in massive, undischargeable debt. What a crock of manure that is.

Then I remember that my job is not to fix all the injustices in the world -- my job is (I hope someday) to teach the students in my class, whoever they may be - wherever they come from. This is why I admire Shaughnessy. She doesn't spend any time belaboring the unpreparedness of her students or complaining about the impossibilty of her situation. She seems to take the tack that she is faced with a very difficult, but solveable problem. She made Basic Writing into a discipline and looked for ways to fix the problem. This is quite admirable.

There is no getting around the fact that Standard American English (SAE) is a shibboleth. It is the a very good way for students to enter the world of the middle class - the world of high salaries, good schools, good nutrition, and safe neighborhoods. Of course, the trades are another way into the good life, but it seems to me that as our service and manufacturing economy becomes more sophisticated that even the trades require a great deal more education than they did before. I'm certain that avionics technicians, diesel mechanics, microchip fab workers, paramedics, and other high-paying developed-world tradesmen and women are earning at least an associate's degree and thus taking the concomitant composition requirements.

So I like that Shaughnessy doesn't back down from this fact. She may not like that students are criminally unprepared. She may not like that errors are so distracting to educated readers that they destroy the message. But she knows she can't change these things. So she came up with an entire framework and a discipline for fixing what should could fix. So "Basic Writing"was born.

As for me, I'm very interested in this concept of "basic writing" and how it relates to my undergraduate degree in Teaching English as a Foreign Language. I'm particularly interested in the affective domain aspects of "basic writing,"not just whether students react well to instruction, but how their emotions affect their writing and their ability to learn. Is error correction freezing them in their tracks the same way it does for second language learners? I'll be exploring this question further.

Toeing the line

I've been thinking about the bright line between "bad writing" and "good writing," at least as we can draw it in the most traditional way. I think that many of the rules Dr. Kemp mentions in his discussion of formalist "error-free" composition are vestigial holdovers from Latin. Some of them didn't come from Latin, but they no longer mean anything. Why does it matter if I split an infinitive in English? Why can't I end a sentence with a preposition? Sometimes a sentence should start with a conjunction, even if doing so technically makes it a fragment. Who cares? Because these conventions do nothing to make students better writers. I've read many awful, yet error-free papers.

On the other hand...

I'm sure that many experienced composition teachers can provide examples, but I can't think of a single student paper that could be considered in any way "good" when the student demonstrated a fundamental ignorance of the conventions of style, grammar, and spelling. Those papers were universally awful quite apart from their significant mechanical problems.

In other words, if a student hasn't mastered the basic conventions of written language, there is very little chance that he or she has mastered higher-order skills like style, invention, metaphor, storytelling, or argumentation. Dr. Kemp said it in the podcast: good writers are readers. And readers pick up the mechanical conventions at the same time they pick up the higher-order skills.

So that leads to the question...

It's a series of small questions, really, but it's interesting to me. Which skills are important? What constitutes an error? Isn't every composition toeing a formal line? Writing strictly formally, here are are the errors up with which I will not put:

1. Misspellings and the abuse of homonyms
   The former led to the spellchecker, which obscured the latter in mechanistic camouflage. And while we're at it: "Their," "they're," and "there." They're not that hard.
2. Egregious misuse of punctuation.
   I don't really care about the Oxford comma, or the placement of commas in dependent clauses, unless this placement affects meaning. For beginners, I encourage liberal use of the period as a check against the dreaded run-on sentence. Many problems can be fixed by breaking these gargantuan crimes against style into smaller sentences. Of course, the apostrophe is a terrible punctuation mark, but I insist that students learn it.
3. The run-on sentence and the comma splice
4. Various sins too egregious to count
   Yes, this one is a cop-out. I'm writing here about errors that are so ungrammatical that they confuse the reader. I mean the truly egregious errors that give English teachers a shiver and make Shakespeare twitch in his grave: subject/verb disagreement, true (nonsensical) fragments, mixed tenses, and their many, many counterparts.
5. Inauthentic voice
   A broadly defined crime against writing, "inauthentic voice" comes when students try to write for no audience in a tone they imagine as "academic." This inauthentic voice is the perpetrator of: esoteric words that don't quite fit, the use of "myself" when "me" is the correct pronoun, tortured constructions, long sentences, nominalization, deletion of the agent, weak verbs, vague propositions (especially in introductions) and the like. It's hard to pin down in a short description, but it is awful. You know it when you see it.

I suspect that even the most anti-foundational teacher of composition forces students to toe a line somewhere. Where do you draw yours?

Kids These Days!

I was a writing tutor for four years as an undergraduate. The students who came to me for help were almost always enrolled in Developmental Writing on Composition I. Most of them were unprepared to write at the college level.

The students were usually deficient in two important areas. First, they didn't grasp the mechanics of writing. They had very little understanding of grammar or style. Naturally, I spent a lot of time on comma splices, run-on sentences, and awkward constructions. Often, students wrote with an inauthentic voice. In their attempts to write academically, they wrote stilted sentences and attempted to wield words which were beyond the limits of their vocabularies. These problems were fixable.

Helping students construct arguments from a series of poorly connected musings was more difficult. I found that most of these students had no understanding of argumentation, so even the traditional tripartite essay presented them with great challenges.

It's so easy to pen a jeremiad against our students' ill preparation and to jump on the bandwagon of decline. Older generations bemoan the decline and ill preparation of the youth. "Kids these days" can't write a full sentences. They can't make an argument. They don't know the difference between a conjunction and an adverb. But these claims are not new. Texting is making them stupid. But these claims are nothing new. (PDF link) You might protest, "Well, the texting claim is certainly new." It isn't. Writing teachers have regularly protested new technologies like the pencil eraser. Texting is just the latest burr in our very old saddle. (In Phaedrus, Plato objected to literacy.)

What does this have to do with the English Department or English as a discipline? It seems to me that the United States Higher Education system is near the breaking point of a bubble inflated by guaranteed student loans and the (I think) misplaced idea that college is the only sensible route for students who hope to achieve any degree of success in life. These poor students, who might be excellent physicians, plumbers, electricians, microchip manufacturers, medical technicians, or participants in any number of high paying careers, are being squeezed through a system that was designed to turn out really excellent clergy and lawyers. Not every student is suited to a career in letters. But our education bubble treats them all as if they are.

When the bubble bursts, the English department will change, just as it has changed dramatically in the 150 or so years since it was first created as a catchall department for various language and rhetoric-related disciplines. In 1967, Parker wondered if federal funding for education would divorce literature from composition. I wonder if the bursting of the educational bubble will create much more dramatic changes in English education.

I'm certain that in 50 years, writing instructors will bemoan their student's inability to write effectively as they romanticize the idyllic turn of the century when students were so much better prepared. I also think that most of these instructors will not be English professors. They will not have studied literature, poetry, or linguistics. I fear that they will be teaching for an hourly wage on a 12 month contract. But I don't know the future. I hope it's not true, because I would like to be a traditional English professor one day.