Just fyi, I went to high school in New York State from 1950
to 1954 and, during those years, never wrote a single essay,
unless doing so was part of a Regents exam. Basically, my
first encounter with the essay as a form was in my first year
of college. If I learned anything about writing in high school
it was from a second-year teacher who obsessively drilled
us in sentence diagramming, thank God. And, oh, yes, in
high school I also learned touch-typing and how to drive a
car and a bit of Spanish.

Hal

"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
			--Marshall McLuhan

Halvard Johnson
================
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On Jan 18, 2009, at 5:15 PM, Mark Weiss wrote:

> From this side of the border this discussion smacks of fairytales.  
> In most of the US public education has been in free fall for the  
> last two generations, with elementary schools passing on functional  
> illiterates to high schools which pass them on in turn to colleges.  
> I remember a girl in my freshman comp class in Arizona, who told me  
> that the longest paper she'd ever been asked to write in high school  
> was a one paragraph movie review. She had a hard time writing a  
> sentence, and she was an average student in the class. It gets  
> worse. To graduate from U of Arizona she had to take and pass  
> freshman comp, but she didn't have to do it as a freshman. She was a  
> junior.
>
> This is not atypical, and Tucson is by no means the least literate  
> US city. And it's not a matter of failure to read, though some of  
> that girl's classmates had a hard time reading a newspaper, and none  
> of them could read it critically. Basic formal education seems to  
> have fallen out of the curriculum.
>
> Want to know how bad it's become? Pick at random 5 English  
> dissertations accepted in 1960 and compare them with five in 2005.  
> These are the teachers-to-be.
>
> Mark
>
>
>
> At 05:55 PM 1/18/2009, you wrote:
>> Yes, Doug, it is the lack of reading that causes most of the  
>> problem. You
>> can teach kids grammar and punctuation at primary school level,  
>> then again
>> at high school level, and still have them ignorant because it is not
>> reinforced in their 'real' lives. They watch visual media and hear  
>> songs and
>> sound tracks without ever coming across the need for printed  
>> punctuation.
>> You can hear it in the way many first year uni students read aloud  
>> - they
>> simply plow through commans, colons, full stops, etc, and pause  
>> whenever
>> they run out of breath! I try to point out how to read using the
>> punctuation, and in doing this show them some examples of how  
>> commas and
>> such actually help supply the meaning (and often the rhthym) of  
>> what is
>> written. But we are fighting an increasing tide with buckets of  
>> sand, I
>> fear.
>>
>> Andrew
>>
>> 2009/1/19 Douglas Barbour <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> > Sadly, you may be, Christopher. I know that teachers try to teach  
>> grammar
>> > to ten year olds (my wife did), but apparently it doesnt stick, or
>> > something. And then, when you factor in what (if anything) they  
>> read,
>> > including newspapers, wherein typos, bad writing, etc now appear  
>> regularly
>> > because there is no such ting as a copy-editor any more. But  
>> mostly when you
>> > factor in the fact that most young people just dont read that  
>> much, so they
>> > have not seen enough sentences to be able to recognize a working  
>> one from a
>> > non-working one, well, yes, if they want to write well now theyve  
>> made it
>> > into university or college, then they require, once again, to be  
>> taught the
>> > basics....
>> >
>> > Doug
>> >
>> > On 17-Jan-09, at 9:59 PM, Christopher C Jones wrote:
>> >
>> >  I have just done a quick search on the use of quote marks and was
>> >> surprised to find how to use was directed at first year college  
>> students
>> >> in the USA undertaking writing courses.
>> >>
>> >> Ummm... is this related to grammar no longer being taught in  
>> primary and
>> >> high school, as if learning how to use inverted commas is too
>> >> intellectually taxing for a ten year old child? It has me  
>> worried that a
>> >> college professor needs to teach basic grammar before anything  
>> else? I
>> >> can understand it for journalism since the inverted pyramid is  
>> very
>> >> strict and not generally well known but for first year writing  
>> students,
>> >> I have some difficulty.
>> >>
>> >> I would have assumed a first year writing student for the first  
>> week's
>> >> assignment could write a dramatic monologue in a voice not their  
>> own
>> >> (usually the opposite sex) and for a term paper a 3,000 word  
>> essay using
>> >> traditional academic footnotes and citation without needing to  
>> be told
>> >> how to.
>> >>
>> >> Am I assuming too much?
>> >>
>> >>
>> > Douglas Barbour
>> > [log in to unmask]
>> >
>> > http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/ <http://www.ualberta.ca/%7Edbarbour/ 
>> >
>> >
>> > Latest books:
>> > Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
>> > http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
>> > Wednesdays'
>> >
>> > http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>> >
>> > Oh, goddamnit, we forgot the silent prayer.
>> >
>> >            Dwight D, Eisenhower
>> >            [at a cabinet meeting]
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Andrew
>> http://hispirits.blogspot.com/