Literacy

[mutepointe]

I think it has a lot to do with teachers not wanting to teach something that they don't understand themselves.

[jim stone]

Hand out from my courses:

You will probably notice that I wrote all over your papers-lots of red ink, even where you got full credit. I don't do this to persecute you or to criticize you; I simply want to share with you some of what I know about writing well. These particular exams present you with a golden opportunity to improve your writing a great deal- to take a giant step forward in writing well. Let me encourage you to do that, to learn to express difficult ideas with simplicity and clarity. It's easy to do, if you are willing to work at it like a demon, to write and then rewrite, and then rewrite. Clarity and simplicity is something for which you can develop a passion, it can become an obsession, a healthy addiction. Let me encourage you to develop a passion for clarity.

All of you are a lot brighter than your writing makes you look. You understand things better than you write them down. But the motto we all need to adopt is a statement from John Searle: If you can't express it clearly, you don't understand it yourself. The way you learn to express something clearly is to reread critically what you write, looking for unclarity, then rewrite, then rewrite, and so on. Make it a matter of personal pride that your writing will do your intelligence justice. When you can express yourselves clearly you will find that you have become a great deal more intelligent. One of the jobs of a university is to make sure its graduates write like educated men and women.

Writing that is simple and lucid is beautiful. One of the great and lasting pleasures in human life is writing well. This is one way we can all be artists. The special aesthetic virtue of writing down difficult ideas well is elegance. Elegance is economy and simplicity and directness; the opposite of elegance is busyness. When you write with elegance your writing looks easy-- the reader thinks you sat down and tossed the thing off.

Good philosophical writing is kindly. Everything is done to help the reader. What question are you answering? At what stage are you in your exposition? Are you giving an argument? Is this sentence a premiss or a conclusion? How is the reader to know? It is helpful to signpost what you are doing, to explicitly ask the question you are about to answer, and to use "conclusion indicators" like "therefore" "consequently" "it follows that" 'this entails that" and so on. Logical terminology is a big help. The reader should know, sentence by sentence, what you are doing, where you are in your exposition. If you look for the arguments, express them using premiss and conclusion indicators, and keep your reader in mind, your job will become much easier.

Beware the word "it." Nine out of ten times when undergraduates use pronouns like "it" the reader has no idea what they are referring to. Usually when you use the word 'they', the reader will have no idea what it is you are referring to. The paragraph is a thing of beauty. When you get to the end of something, start a new paragraph. The last thing you want is to present your reader with a monolithic solid block of text. Proof read what you write-- so that you correct big errors, for example, you can put in missing words. Just write them in in pen over the type written copy.

[crookedtune]

Just write them in in pen over the type written copy.

Google pen if u knead to c a pitcher.

[HDSarah]

Science, math, technical stuff is perhaps different.

I remember reading an article 20-some years ago in the university student newspaper that reported average grade point averages for students in various majors. The writer (presumably a journalism major) seemed to believe that the high GPA of education majors in comparison to engineering majors meant that the education majors were smarter. My friends and I (math graduate students at the time) thought that was pretty funny. To me, the obvious explanation is higher standards and more intellectually demanding material in the engineering curriculum. (In the years since then, I got an M.S. degree in civil engineering and secondary teacher certification, so I can say from experience that I was right about engineering classes vs. education classes.)

I think it's somewhat easier to hold to a fixed standard of competence in something like precalculus (which I teach frequently) than in freshman composition. Math classes and many science classes build on previous classes; you really do need to take them in order and to master certain skills before moving on. Knowing that any student who gets a "C" or higher in my precalculus class is considered qualified to enroll in calculus I the next semester constitutes a good deterrent to mercy grading or dumbing-down the curriculum. On the down side, the failure rate (including withdrawal midsemester) is high. Also, I have to admit that I am sometimes astounded at the answers I get when I use an exam question that asks students to "Explain in one or two complete sentences." Many students can write a complete sentence (especially after having points deducted on a previous quiz or exam for not using a complete sentence) but their answer is incorrect. Others write incomplete sentences, or gibberish. For the pay I get as an adjunct instructor, I would NOT grade essays! I grumble about grading math tests, but grading papers would be much worse. (But I do really grade the math tests, including reading their work and making sure they use notation correctly. I do not approve of multiple-choice exams.)

[s1m0n]

There are a lot of opposites of elegance.

[s1m0n]

The funny thing is, every generation since Adam has been absolutely convinced that 'kids these days' are learning absolutely nothing compared to how it used to be when they were kids, but over time, the sum of human knowledge has shown the exact opposite of such a decline. If you think kids these days know nothing, all it means is that you are middle aged. The kids are as alright as they ever were.

The only thing that's different is that people stay in school longer, partly because the world is more technical, and partly because we have largely abandoned the apprenticeship model of training. This means that students who'd have been shuffled off to technical school into a trade now goes to college, where they can with convenience appall Jim, but each cohort has about the same number of smart, less smart, ordinary and stupid people as at any other time.

[crookedtune]

s1m0n, I believe you're right about that, though it's hard to admit, as I'm a geezer myself. The truth is, the kids ARE alright, as that famous now-geezer band made clear back in its glory days. The kids are ALWAYS alright, and they somehow manage to build on the best of what came before. That's the way of the world.

Things do advance, but just not in the way that the 'old guard' would expect and promote. And I'm here to say, keeping one's mind truly open gets harder with age!

C'est la vie, say the old folks. It goes to show you never can tell.

[Mockingbird]

grading papers would be much worse.

My theology prof. hubby would agree. Heck, even I can grade the objective portions to streamline it for him. Those essay portions & papers...

[Mockingbird]

On the down side, the failure rate (including withdrawal midsemester) is high.

I remember in our college certain majors deliberately "weeded out" undergrads. (I know the fine arts dept. used the music theory classes to do so.)

[Doug_Tipple]

When I was in undergraduate college (1961-1965), you brought your blue book (a blank book of maybe 50 pages) to the test. There were no multiple choice questions. The tests consisted of a series of questions that you needed to answer in essay form. In graduate school, as a graduate assistant in geology, it was my job to grade the tests. Accordingly, I had to fail students that could not express themselves in writing. I saw a lot of tears in the interviews with students who were doing poorly, but the truth of the matter was that many of them were just not prepared to function at a college level. They wanted to be in college, but they didn't have the necessary skills. Twenty years later, as a high school teacher in mathematics, trying to teach 3rd track students algebra and geometry, I had to lower my standards quite a bit. If I wanted to keep my job and be successful as a teacher, I had to present material that my students were able to comprehend and demonstrate some level of competence on a test. I'm sure that the teachers of the better math students in the the first and second tracks presented material at a more difficult level.

[talasiga]

.......
When my wife was teaching middle school I asked her how come none of the kids wrote in cursive, and she said, "Well, it's not on the state proficiency test, so the elementary school teachers don't teach it."

So what are these kids going to do when they come to work in the real world and their boss hands them a hand-written note?

Apparently, the precedent for kids and hand written notes was set since Adam .......

[s1m0n]

So what are these kids going to do when they come to work in the real world and their boss hands them a hand-written note?

The same thing the generation after typerwriters did when they stopped teaching copperplate.

And they're likely to be a whole lot more adept than you think about reading it. After all, you and I went through school looking at a grand total of about three different typefaces. Five if you count the Italic and Roman balls on the school secretary's brand new selectric. Anyone growing up in the past 15 years has seen and coped with hundreds. To them, cursive is going to be just another font. They'll get it.

[Innocent Bystander]

Several months ago, I watched a seminar on a writing course we've been using, and the presenter said something that struck me as very true (for me, at least). It was something to the effect that coherent writing is the foundation for coherent thought. No question: communicating in writing organizes and streamlines my otherwise scattered thought process and shows pretty quickly & objectively any problems with reasoning, gaps in knowledge, and so forth.

The other way around. If you do not possess coherent thought, you will find it difficult to write coherently. On the other hand, a receptive mind will observe examples of coherent thought and emulate it as being more efficient. To put it another way, coherent thought can be taught.

The overmanning of universities may be a factor in the dumbing down. To a European observer, there is a more obvious one. There is an approach, deeply embedded in U.S. culture, that the will to succeed is more significant than the ability. If you have the will, the ability will come, is the belief. The will, or the wish, is cultivated to a much greater extent than the ability. Along with this, and in a corollary fashion, moderate ability is dismissed. Anyone who is not a winner is a loser. Competitors are not praised for playing the game, but denigrated because they did not get first place. This in turn leads to situations where ebullient individuals argue their way into pass-marks they otherwise would not have managed.

[crookedtune]

My first impulse was to bristle at that, (yes, like a hedgehog). Actually, there's some truth in it. The Horatio Alger thing, and all.

In our defense, we didn't give the flying-saucer-balloon guy or Octomom their own reality shows --- yet.

[mutepointe]

They weren't good-looking enough and were way too old. That's why.