[Infowarrior] - Quasi-OT: Writing Off Reading

[Richard Forno]

(xposted to Questor and infowarrior-l)

Somewhat off topic, but I think there are enough folks present on this list
who might find this article interesting, if not also a bit disturbing.  -rf

Writing Off Reading

By Michael Skube
Sunday, August 20, 2006; B03
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/08/18/AR2006081800
976_pf.html

We were talking informally in class not long ago, 17 college sophomores and
I, and on a whim I asked who some of their favorite writers are. The
question hung in uneasy silence. At length, a voice in the rear hesitantly
volunteered the name of . . . Dan Brown.

No other names were offered.

The author of "The DaVinci Code" was not just the best writer they could
think of; he was the only writer they could think of.

In our better private universities and flagship state schools today, it's
hard to find a student who graduated from high school with much lower than a
3.5 GPA, and not uncommon to find students whose GPAs were 4.0 or higher.
They somehow got these suspect grades without having read much. Or if they
did read, they've given it up. And it shows -- in their writing and even in
their conversation.

A few years ago, I began keeping a list of everyday words that may as well
have been potholes in exchanges with college students. It began with a
fellow who was two months away from graduating from a well-respected
Midwestern university.

"And what was the impetus for that?" I asked as he finished a presentation.

At the word "impetus" his head snapped sideways, as if by reflex. "The
what?" he asked.

"The impetus. What gave rise to it? What prompted it?"

I wouldn't have guessed that impetus was a 25-cent word. But I also wouldn't
have guessed that "ramshackle" and "lucid" were exactly recondite, either.
I've had to explain both. You can be dead certain that today's college
students carry a weekly planner. But they may or may not own a dictionary,
and if they do own one, it doesn't get much use. ("Why do you need a
dictionary when you can just go online?" more than one student has asked
me.)

You may be surprised -- and dismayed -- by some of the words on my list.

"Advocate," for example. Neither the verb nor the noun was immediately clear
to students who had graduated from high school with GPAs above 3.5. A few
others:

"Derelict," as in neglectful.

"Satire," as in a literary form.

"Pith," as in the heart of the matter.

"Brevity," as in the quality of being succinct.

And my favorite: "Novel," as in new and as a literary form. College students
nowadays call any book, fact or fiction, a novel. I have no idea why this
is, but I first became acquainted with the peculiarity when a senior at one
of the country's better state universities wrote a paper in which she
referred to "The Prince" as "Machiavelli's novel."

As freshmen start showing up for classes this month, colleges will have a
new influx of high school graduates with gilded GPAs, and it won't be long
before one professor whispers to another: Did no one teach these kids basic
English? The unhappy truth is that many students are hard-pressed to string
together coherent sentences, to tell a pronoun from a preposition, even to
distinguish between "then" and "than." Yet they got A's.

How does one explain the inability of college students to read or write at
even a high school level? One explanation, which owes as much to the culture
as to the schools, is that kids don't read for pleasure. And because they
don't read, they are less able to navigate the language. If words are the
coin of their thought, they're working with little more than pocket change.

Say this -- but no more -- for the Bush administration's No Child Left
Behind Act: It at least recognizes the problem. What we're graduating from
our high schools isn't college material. Sometimes it isn't even good high
school material.

When students with A averages can't write simple English, it shouldn't be
surprising that people ask what a high school diploma is really worth. In
California this year, hundreds of high school students, many with good
grades, faced the prospect of not graduating because they could not pass a
state-mandated exit exam. Although a judge overturned the effort,
legislators (not always so literate themselves) in other states have also
called for exit exams. It's hardly unreasonable to ask that students
demonstrate a minimum competency in basic subjects, especially English.

Exit exams have become almost a necessity because the GPA is not to be
trusted. In my experience, a high SAT score is far more reliable than a high
GPA -- more indicative of quickness and acuity, and more reflective of
familiarity with language and ideas. College admissions specialists are of a
different view and are apt to label the student with high SAT scores but
mediocre grades unmotivated, even lazy.

I'll take that student any day. I've known such students. They may have been
bored in high school but they read widely and without prodding from a
parent. And they could have nominated a few favorite writers besides Dan
Brown -- even if they thoroughly enjoyed "The DaVinci Code."

I suspect they would have understood the point I tried unsuccessfully to
make once when I quoted Joseph Pulitzer to my students. It is journalism's
job, he said, to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Too
obvious, you think? I might have thought so myself -- if the words
"afflicted" and "afflict" hadn't stumped the whole class.

mskube at elon.edu

Michael Skube teaches journalism at Elon University in Elon, N.C.