The NYT,
The Fine Art of Getting It Down
on Paper, Fast
By Brent
Staples
Imagine yourself a senior partner in
a large accounting firm that has just hired a promising analyst from a top-tier
college. You negotiate a generous salary and spend a fortune moving the new
employee to an office in a distant city - only to find that he can't write a
lick. He crunches numbers well enough and clearly knows the principles of
accounting. But like many otherwise bright, well-educated people, he was never
trained to express his thoughts in words. The blood drains from your face as
you read that first audit report, which is so poorly
structured as to be unintelligible.
These kinds of disappointments have a
long history in the corporate world. Companies once covered for poor writers by
surrounding them with people who could translate their thoughts onto paper. But
this strategy has proved less practical in the bottom-line-driven information
age, which requires more high-quality writing from more categories of employees
than ever before. Instead of covering for nonwriters, companies are
increasingly looking for ways to screen them out at the door.
This was clearly the subtext message
of a report released last year by the National Commission on Writing, a panel
of educators convened by the College Board. At the heart of the report - titled
"Writing: A Ticket to Work ... or a Ticket Out" - is an eye-opening
assessment of corporate attitudes about writing, surveying members of the
Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation's
leading corporations.
The findings, though given a positive
gloss, were not encouraging. About a third of the companies reported that only
one-third or fewer of their employees knew how to write clearly and concisely.
The companies expressed a fair degree of dissatisfaction with the writing
produced by recent college graduates - even though many were blue-chip
companies that get the pick of the litter.
The poor writing found among both new
and established employees has turned business leaders into champions of
education reform and of the No Child Left Behind
Education Act, which aims to strengthen public schools and erase the
achievement gap between rich and poor children. But persuading schools to
improve math and reading instruction, even in exchange for federal dollars, has
proved difficult. Persuading schools to rethink the teaching of writing - those
that teach it at all - is going to be a lot harder.
The depth of the resistance to
common-sense writing reforms became clear in April, when the National Council
of Teachers of English attacked the College Board for adding a writing segment
to the SAT, the college entrance exam required by an overwhelming majority of
America's four-year colleges and universities. The test, which consists of a
brief, timed essay and a multiple-choice section, has already put schools and
parents on notice that writing instruction needs to
improve.
The English teachers, however, have
other ideas. The group questioned the validity of the tests and trotted out the
condescending notion that requiring poor and minority students to write in standard English is unfair because of their cultural
backgrounds and vernacular languages. This is sadly reminiscent of the
"Ebonics" proposal of the 1990's, in which misguided educators
supported the appalling notion that street slang was as good
or better than the standard tongue and should be given credence in
student work produced for school.
The council also tried to discredit
the idea of timed writing tests. The report seemed to suggest that the only way
to judge writing was to consider student work that had been rewritten and
edited over longer periods of time. Long-term projects are important, but they
do not cover all of the kinds of writing that students will be called upon to
produce either in college or in their lives. On the contrary, substantive
writing on demand for reports, correspondence and even e-mail is now a common
feature of corporate life.
The teachers also seemed to feel that
only other English teachers were qualified to judge what good writing is. The
evidence suggests, however, that most teachers have never taken a course in how
to teach effective writing and that many don't know how to produce it
themselves.
The blame lies not with the teachers,
however, but with an American educational system that fails at every level to
produce the fluent writers required by the new economy. To change that, the
state colleges of education that produce most teachers will need to improve
writing instruction courses and require all students to take them. The time
devoted to writing instruction in kindergarten through 12th grade needs to be
more skillfully used and doubled, at the very least.
The English teachers are right when
they note that we live in a test-obsessed culture that puts far too much weight
on the SAT. The test is supposed to be used as one element among many in
deciding who enters college. But the test developers have performed an
important service by bringing writing to the top of the national agenda.
What we need now is a revolution in
writing instruction, not just another test prep exercise.