Concerning "The Seven Deadly Sins of Student Writers" by Ben Yagoda
Honestly, I cannot express how much I truly enjoyed this article. As a professional editor and graduate student (also professional according to my father), I encounter these mistakes on a daily basis. I also shake my head in sadness on a daily basis. It really is a sad state of affairs when the technology we have come to depend on - e-mail, instant messenger, blogs, etc. - quickly becomes the downfall of proper grammar and mechanics. But Yagoda is correct in pointing out that the badly edited nature of our technological communication has a startling effect on the prose of the current generation of students. And, honestly, it's not just the younger students who are affected. Last weekend I was helping a friend edit the first few chapters of her dissertation. She is 28, graduated from Texas A&M and received her masters from UT where she is also currently working on her PhD. I say this to prove that she is a well-educated individual. However, once I started editing her work, I realized my friend was, in fact, a comma fanatic. Commas, commas EVERYWHERE! I immediately called her up and suggested we read the dissertation together over the phone. I have found that proofreading out loud catches many more mistakes than reading silently and helps to straighten out awkward sentences. Once we started and I made a point to pause at each of her incorrect commas, then continue on, she was shocked. Her high school teacher had taught her if ever in doubt about commas, put one in. Oh my! And the fact that she made it through tons of college essays using this rule of thumb simply amazes me. So, although new technologies of online communication have a hand in the bad grammar of today’s writers, many of the mistakes have also been brought with them from grammar school and haven't been corrected in their later education.
Another rule of the article that I have experienced personally is the spell checker. Oh, how writers simply love this feature, and oh, how us who edit hate it. Spell check is a tool that has not only invaded my college career but also my professional. As an editor, I generally do two read-throughs of a title. I edit it the first time for grammar, punctuation, mechanics and style, and also make comments and suggestions for improvement. After the author has made the changes they feel necessary from my comments, they send it back to me for a final edit. Mind you, I have already edited for grammar and mechanics, and yet EVERY author feels the need to spell check it ONE MORE TIME before sending it back to me, thereby thoroughly wrecking all correct changes I have previously made. The frustration I feel for this nifty little tool in MS Word cannot be expressed. If I could blow smoke out of my ears, the gesture would come somewhat close to conveying what a complete nuisance I think the spell checker makes of itself.
Going back to the state of online communication and how it affects writers today, I will say again I agree this is a definite contributor to the state of student writing, but another is the simple fact of published prose. Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, etc., have all diminished in their editing of grammar/mechanics. And honestly, this cannot be blamed on authors, but rather editors (which I cringe to say). I cannot even count the number of times in the past month I had to put down the current popular fiction book I was reading or my copy of RT Book Reviews because all the spelling and punctuation mistakes were driving me crazy! And honestly, if a student is reading popular fiction or the like, and comes across grammatical errors, they probably think 'well, if John Grisham can do it, so can I'. This is not a good thing.
As I talked about with my example of my PhD friend’s dissertation, many grammatical rules, that may not be correct, are taught at a young age, or simply picked up by reading bad prose. It is our job, as future teachers, to catch these errors as soon as we can, and correct them. The writing mistakes of future scholars cannot be corrected all at once, but by catching and improving them one by one, we can slowly move our way back to a grammatically correct society. (And I just have to say, I write this essay in terror of everyone catching my own violation of the 7 deadly sins!)
Honestly, I cannot express how much I truly enjoyed this article. As a professional editor and graduate student (also professional according to my father), I encounter these mistakes on a daily basis. I also shake my head in sadness on a daily basis. It really is a sad state of affairs when the technology we have come to depend on - e-mail, instant messenger, blogs, etc. - quickly becomes the downfall of proper grammar and mechanics. But Yagoda is correct in pointing out that the badly edited nature of our technological communication has a startling effect on the prose of the current generation of students. And, honestly, it's not just the younger students who are affected. Last weekend I was helping a friend edit the first few chapters of her dissertation. She is 28, graduated from Texas A&M and received her masters from UT where she is also currently working on her PhD. I say this to prove that she is a well-educated individual. However, once I started editing her work, I realized my friend was, in fact, a comma fanatic. Commas, commas EVERYWHERE! I immediately called her up and suggested we read the dissertation together over the phone. I have found that proofreading out loud catches many more mistakes than reading silently and helps to straighten out awkward sentences. Once we started and I made a point to pause at each of her incorrect commas, then continue on, she was shocked. Her high school teacher had taught her if ever in doubt about commas, put one in. Oh my! And the fact that she made it through tons of college essays using this rule of thumb simply amazes me. So, although new technologies of online communication have a hand in the bad grammar of today’s writers, many of the mistakes have also been brought with them from grammar school and haven't been corrected in their later education.
Another rule of the article that I have experienced personally is the spell checker. Oh, how writers simply love this feature, and oh, how us who edit hate it. Spell check is a tool that has not only invaded my college career but also my professional. As an editor, I generally do two read-throughs of a title. I edit it the first time for grammar, punctuation, mechanics and style, and also make comments and suggestions for improvement. After the author has made the changes they feel necessary from my comments, they send it back to me for a final edit. Mind you, I have already edited for grammar and mechanics, and yet EVERY author feels the need to spell check it ONE MORE TIME before sending it back to me, thereby thoroughly wrecking all correct changes I have previously made. The frustration I feel for this nifty little tool in MS Word cannot be expressed. If I could blow smoke out of my ears, the gesture would come somewhat close to conveying what a complete nuisance I think the spell checker makes of itself.
Going back to the state of online communication and how it affects writers today, I will say again I agree this is a definite contributor to the state of student writing, but another is the simple fact of published prose. Fiction, non-fiction, magazines, etc., have all diminished in their editing of grammar/mechanics. And honestly, this cannot be blamed on authors, but rather editors (which I cringe to say). I cannot even count the number of times in the past month I had to put down the current popular fiction book I was reading or my copy of RT Book Reviews because all the spelling and punctuation mistakes were driving me crazy! And honestly, if a student is reading popular fiction or the like, and comes across grammatical errors, they probably think 'well, if John Grisham can do it, so can I'. This is not a good thing.
As I talked about with my example of my PhD friend’s dissertation, many grammatical rules, that may not be correct, are taught at a young age, or simply picked up by reading bad prose. It is our job, as future teachers, to catch these errors as soon as we can, and correct them. The writing mistakes of future scholars cannot be corrected all at once, but by catching and improving them one by one, we can slowly move our way back to a grammatically correct society. (And I just have to say, I write this essay in terror of everyone catching my own violation of the 7 deadly sins!)
posted by JulieS at 2:49 PM
3 Comments:
I agree, I think, with your basic premise, but I'm not sure you can blame technology. I can't lay my hands on them now, but the same sorts of complaints about poor student writing have been made since the turn of the century (uh, the last one, not this one).
You might be interested by the following--I'm taking it from another article by Musgrove, the fellow who wrote the 7 deadly sins article, this one at
http://insidehighered.com/views/2006/07/11/musgrove
"In a 1986 study described in College Composition and Communication under the title “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” Robert J. Connors and Andrea A. Lunsford discovered that “college students are not making more formal errors in writing than they used to.” They compared error patterns identified by researchers in 1917 and 1930 and found that though the length of paper assignments had consistently increased over nearly 80 years, “the formal skills of students have not declined precipitously.”
Further they claim, “[i]n spite of open admissions, in spite of radical shifts in demographics of college students, in spite of the huge escalation in population percentage as well as in sheer numbers of people attending American colleges, freshman are still committing approximately the same number of formal errors per 100 words they were before World War I.”
and
"In another College Composition and Communication article, published in 1990 and titled “Frequency of Errors in Essays by College Freshmen and by Professional Writers,” Gary Sloan both confirmed the Connors and Lunsford study and discovered that even though professional writers are often served up as models for student writers, their writing may contribute to student confusion about correctness because their essays contain almost as many errors as first-year themes. Sloan selected 20 published essays from a college composition reader and 20 student essays composed during the last week of an introductory writing course. He then analyzed these two samples using an error analysis technique derived from a grammar handbook commonly used in college writing courses.
His conclusion? “Connors and Lunsford found 9.53 errors per essay or 2.26 errors per 100 words; my figures for the same are 9.60 and 2.04. The professionals have 8.55 errors per writer and 1.82 per 100 words.” Further, given the fact that misspelling was the most common error in student writing, but absent in professional writing, the student error count would have actually been less than the professional average if students had only spellchecked their essays — again an editing technology not available to many students in 1990."
Again, I DO believe that reading and writing are intricately linked; however, I'm not convinced that technology has impacted writing ability, as you suggest, in a negative way. And while I do believe that college students should be writing better, I'm not sure that they're worse than they ever were--but my question is, why aren't they getting better?
Ack! Musgrove didn't write the 7 deadly sins...but he's a frequent contributor in the same vein. Mea culpa!
on a completely side note, did anybody else notice something strange happen when you went to leave a comment? i think i can still see your blog on my wall. it's burned into my retina or something. lol! i can almost read it too. . .
anyway. the tendency to run spellcheck is almost second nature to our generation. i can't imagine how many words you had to sort through to find a mistake, and then to lose the needle in the haystack once again. and again. and again. how would do you feel about grammar checking programs? i know they're still not up to professional standards, but if they ever were, would find a use for it?
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