Posted on 05/01/2019 5:45:27 AM PDT by reaganaut1
Public school, yes, in Texas.
Advise for the ruling class: take AP English (or equivalent) to pass out of freshman English. Saves you cerebral grief, keeps the money in your pocket, and you can finish your degree on time.
It’s true, most young people have the attention span of a coker spaniel
I am a community college librarian and I have worked in my position for twenty-five years. Over those years on several occasions I have read lots of research papers and essays students will just print out and then walk out and leave, never to return to collect. The writing quality has been on a spiral downward, especially in the last ten years.
I have student workers who ask me to critique their assignments every semester. I always tell them before giving their paper to me to read, read it yourself and imagine you were reading it like a news reporter. Would your audience be able to understand what you are trying to get across. That usually helps them to write a better product.
I have preached to my children about being able to write a coherent essay with an introduction, the body of the paper and a conclusion. I have also told them to learn basic mathematics and be able to speak to a group of people clearly and succinctly and they would be ahead of the game in the workforce.
The high schools in this country are failing miserably in the products they are graduating and now the college are having to try and teach these students just the basics of everything in regard to education.
I tend to disagree somewhat. Having worked for a leading edge engineering firm for thirty years 90% of my writing was technical documentation and instructions for users. It was parsed and parsed again. Content, structure, clarity and logic were stressed. And yet, this had to be produced so as to not sound as if it were written by a robot. Motherhood and apple pie were strictly prohibited. Personally, I found this a very rewarding field. As I advanced reviewing the technical documents, and later, signatory authority became the norm.
The decine of graduates writing ability started to become noticable in the late ‘70s to early ‘80s.
I don’t disagree at all. What I found was there is a continuum running from specificity on one end to comprehension on the other. It’s a zero sum game.
Funny. I like it.
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