My daughter graduated from college last month with a 3.4 GPA and is looking for a job. I sent her a few web sites that mentioned openings and received the following reply:
I don’t think she was being sloppy just because she was casually using email; this was basically the pattern I saw when I would read some of her class papers. I realize there are many college graduates who measure up to the spelling, syntax, diction, and mechanics of Standard English. But I suspect that there are many who, like my daughter, do not even come close.
Who is at fault? My daughter for not paying attention to the basics? The public school system for not stressing them? Or the college, for not insisting on some level of ability befitting a degree holder from that institution?
Or does 21st century world not care one way or the other?
Not to poke a hornet’s nest with a stick or anything, but the parents are always at the top of my blame list when it comes to academic failures in intellectually able kids. If you’ve noticed this before, why didn’t you see to it that she learned what she needed to back in grade school and high school when you had some control over her? Education does not exist independent of the family.
However, I’ll agree that the educational system should shoulder some of the blame as well. People who cannot string six sentences together without making a half dozen errors or more have no business being awarded a degree.
People are getting use to shortening words, grammar and punctuation while sending instant messages. When using a keyboard there really isn’t an excuse for the shortening other than being lazy. When using a cell phone though it is totally understandable.
I wouldn’t sweat it at all. My department director has serious problems with subject-verb agreement, and it hasn’t hurt her career a bit. In fact, I’ve had very few managers in my career who could string two words together coherently; from what I’ve seen, having excellent grammar and spelling skills pretty much qualifies one to edit the outgoing emails and memos of the people in charge.
As an English professor, I think I’m the guy you’re looking for.
No time now for a lengthy reply (I’m late already as it is) but I’ve passed students far more illiterate than your child simply because there’s no pressure to fail students (quite the opposite) and constant pressure to pass them. And change though I have to make my own life easier, I still waste far too much time in the the Dean’s office justifying my low grades, and still get mean spirited, ignorant, vicious “he hates students–he gave me a ‘D’ because I didn’t hand in my final research paper”-type comments on rate my professor.com. (only rarely that literately worded.)
Sue the university. Create pressure to fail a modicum of students regularly, and to have a dropout rate of x% (> than 0) become the acceptable range.
Damn, pseudotriton. Where were you when I was a student?
I was an engineering/computer science major, and I distinctly remember the professor in the one upper-division English course I took (a Shakespeare course) threatening to drop any paper that didn’t do the apostrophe thing right (especially with regard to “it’s/its”) an entire grade step (e.g., A- to B+). The TA’s were similarly picky about other mistakes. I proofread my papers very well for that class…
“Whom” is such a lovely word, yet it seems to have fallen out of favor even among those who profess to value correct grammar. Ask yourself why you did not use whom and you may find the answer to why she eschews other grammar niceties.
My English and grammar skills are not the best in the world, but the severe lack of ability to write a sentence that is demonstrated by my superiors here in an educational institution (post-secondary) is utterly atrocious.
I have to wonder how so many people with advanced degrees are completely unable to avoid creating a three line memo in which every line is a sentence fragment.
Not only that, but they also misspell very common words and are constantly leaving typos in the finished letters. They have even run full-page, color newspaper advertisements filled with errors.
I used to cut out the advertisment or take my copy of the memo and circle the errors with corrections and give it back to the person who wrote it, but that seems to have done absolutely nothing to fix the grammar.
However, their poor grammar skills has not stopped them from obtaining offices with titles like ‘President’, ‘Vice-President’, and ‘Director.’ It should also be noted that one of the ‘Directors’ with horrible English skills has a Master’s degree in English.
Last semester, I took a course called Media Writing, the goal of which was to teach us how to write in the proper journalistic style for each mode of mass communication.
We occasionally had to critique each other’s work. I’ve never seen or heard so much lousy writing in my life. These had obvious (and atrocious) grammatical errors, spelling errors, style errors, and a few of my classmates seem to be on the fast track to getting their employers sued.
Suffice it to say, everyone in that class got an A. One person whose assignment I had to critique (and almost slit my wrist over; there was THAT much red ink on the paper!) is now the president of our university’s chapter of the Public Relations Students Society of America. She’s got a tough row to hoe if her writing doesn’t improve.
Pretty well every paper I’ve ever submitted to a university professor receives a mark in the high 90’s, if not 100.
I have no illusions, whatsoever, that this is because I have brilliant ideas in the field of psychology, and is, in fact, because I can actually write with a degree of accuracy (not that the majority of my posts on this board reflect that) and attention to the nicities of grammer and punctuation.
My father, a retired university prof, agrees.
So, basically you can have good ideas and still receive excellent marks if you have good grammar and punctuation skills.
If you have crap grammar and punctuation skills, you beter have spectacular ideas if you want to get decent marks.
So - apparently your daughter has some pretty spectacular ideas.
Did you share with her concerns? If her own parent can’t tell her that her writing sucks, why should a teacher?
I know a Ph.D student who recently got chewed out by her advisor for crappy writing. This student has a Master’s and has taught college-level courses, and she is suddenly being told that she should take a freshman English course.
I don’t know where the blame goes, but I would talk to your daughter now. Just say, as casually as possible, that she should work on making her writing more professional and polished. Even in email. Maybe that will be enough to get her to be less sloppy and more deliberate when she communicates.
I am aware that my written skills are lacking. I have very average sentence structure, use too many commas, and when I hear the phrase “deconstruct a sentence” I get a village-idiot type glazed look come over me.
I am also aware that I’m probably in the top 20% of my peers in terms of literacy. It’s a scary thing.
In my defence, I went through the education system at a time when many changes were taking place. I don’t know when to use a “;” correctly. I had to learn what an adverb was, when studying Japanese sentence structure as a senior. And to further make you cringe, I was the brainy one, as others in my class were unaware of what nouns and adjectives were. My parents kept a fairly close eye on my schoolwork, and they were astounded that I didn’t know the basic components of the english language.
[hijack]BTW, anyone know of a good place to look to self-teach better written skills? I would love to learn the things that were thrown out of the syllabus, as I feel that area needs improvement.[/hijack]
Every single parent in the USA that does not take an active role in their children’s education. Every single teacher who does not have the integrity to fail a student because of poor English skills. Every single administrator who pressures a teacher to pass a student even though the student has poor English skills. Every braying liberal jackass who thinks that bi-lingual education is a good thing.
In short, pretty much everybody gets a share of the blame. We as a society dug ourselves into this hole. We as a society have to stop digging and start climbing out of the hole.
I think the problem goes back further than college in a lot of cases. I remember my sophomore year in college taking the basic English composition course required for all students. To me, it was a blow-off class. Besides being a halfway decent English student in high school, I worked in the university’s writing center and knew the teacher. I tell you, I’ve never seen a professional working adult so frustrated in her job. The vast majority of the class, we’re talking 90%, could not properly construct and diagram a sentence. After about a week of class she gave up trying to teach composition and essays and instead taught everybody who needed it the basics. Those of us who COULD write a proper sentence kept on with the normal lesson plan. She was shocked and saddened that these students that had graduated high school could not identify nouns and verbs in a sentence, let alone punctuate it. What’s more, most of the students really didn’t seem to care. It obviously hadn’t been an issue up until the point this teacher called them on it.
Working in the writing center for the next three years I saw more of the same. Many students somehow got into the university without knowing how to write in their native language. I also dealt with many foreign students who had a MUCH better grasp of English than their native counterparts and the simple reason was they tried harder.
My father is a professor at another university, but in his case his field is chemistry. He, too, is often stunned when students fail to write complete sentences or fail at basic mathematics that are supposed to be learned well before they graduate high school. He thought it was ridiculous that he should have to also teach students how to write when they were supposed to be learning science. But, as a responsible teacher, he did it anyway. It just made him very unhappy.
I think when it comes to college students not being able to write, it may be a case of “garbage in, garbage out.” Students aren’t learning writing skills when they’re supposed to and it shows up later in life.
I put some of the blame on the parents, but a majority of it on the professors.
I attend a rather upscale and high-ranking Community College. It has many programs which other schools regionally do not or cannot offer. I like most of the teachers and think they are beyond competent. I generally score in the 90-100% range on a majority of my projects(which all require communication via the written word).
However, I have a MAJOR pet peeve with the school. It has an enormous Asian population, and the school takes advantage of their drive to complete school while they pay “non-resident” school fees. We have a HUGE ESL(english as a second language), Department. It should work well, but it doesn’t. Our ESL students go on to English 1A, 1B and other higher english-requiring courses without being able to speak, understand or write in english. In online courses, it’s impossible to understand and nearly so in on-campus classes.
This is not exclusive to people from other countries though. There are countless native english-speaking students that I’ve run into who write as bad or worse than the ESL students. The quality of writing is deplorable, and it is insulting to the rest of us who have to bust our humps to make ‘A’ papers that nearly all of the students with communications problems pass with a ‘C’ or better.
What’s even worse is that the bar has been lowered so much that those of us who, far from excelling in english but write “well”, get recommendations to the Honors courses due to the delta in quality of writing. It’s an honor, no doubt to be recommended for the Honors-level writing courses, but it’s also a sign in the disparity of the quality of work coming out of our schools today.
