A Little Shelter from the Sun: Road Trip Pt. 2
Driving through the rest of Utah and across Wyoming was peaceful. In fact, I can’t quite remember…
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Write as the Wind Blows
Write as the wind blows and command all words like an army! See them how they stand in rank ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering fellows!
First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no man; fresh, young, hearty, and for the most part very…
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The Metaphysical Importance of Punctuation
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GS-m0UAB3uQ&w=529&h=328]
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Words about “The Words”
Words about “The Words”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjmrDDD9o_k&w=529&h=328]First of all, there are two points concerning this movie that need to made and gotten out of the way. One, I don’t think even famous novelists have women like Olivia Wilde throwing…
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Thank You for the Lie
I feel like everyone should be talking about this. Am I the only one who read “Thank You for the Light” and wondered if it was a fraud?
I have no defensible, scientific reason why I’m firmly convinced that somebody at the New Yorkerwrote an homage to F.…
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I can’t lie and say there are no bad writers. Sorry, but there are lotsof bad writers. Some are on-staff at your local newspaper, usually reviewing little-theater productions or pontificating about the local sports teams. Some have scribbled their way to…
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You Told the Drunks I Knew Karate
It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I’m now blogging here.
Miss Manners and the Evasiveness of the Cell Phone Era
But she is also aware that we are in a peculiar transitional period, when many people have all but abandoned telephoning, even though they carry telephones with them everywhere. They use its other functions to communicate in writing. These are less intrusive and more flexible about time.
By the way, why do the people who write into Miss Manners always try to sound like her?
"At last, a cold front’s moving in, bringing cool air from Canada or Chicago or somewhere. I’m picking the old lady peas for stones, thinking about how we’re breathing the same air those Chicago people breathed two days ago. Wondering if, for no good reason I start thinking about Sears and Roebuck or Shake’n Bake. would it be because some Illinoian had thought it two days ago. It gets my mind off my troubles for about five seconds."
— The Help
One More Reason Your English Degree Is Worthless
I was at a lecture on freelance proofreading the other night and the topic came up of when it would be unethical to accept a proofreading job. Graduate theses, for example, which are judged according to the quality of the writing as well as content, would be problematic. Somebody asked about college entrance essays. The lecturer’s response staggered me.
It would be “iffy,” she said, to “help” someone applying as an English major. Much less problematic would be “helping,” say, a hopeful MCB major.
Wait, what?
So let me understand this. An English major has to have a flawless essay to get into college…and so does everyone else. No one is suggesting that students in the sciences turn in essays filled with errors and verging on the illiterate. They, too, have to write well in order to get into a good university, but they don’t actually have to do the writing themselves. It’s not cheating for them to turn in someone else’s work and get evaluated on it, but it would be cheating for someone in the liberal arts to turn in someone else’s work. Because that’s what cheating is, right? Turning in someone else’s work and getting the credit for it is cheating.
I’ve never seen anybody suggest that a potential English major should hire somebody to take the math portion of the SAT for them. When I applied as a Linguistics major, I killed myself for years (yes, years) to improve my score, and even after all that it was only decent and not stellar. But I didn’t have the option to just flunk out of math entirely in order to get into college, and I would have been horrified if anyone had suggested that those in the liberal arts shouldn’t have any math or science requirements.
And yet it’s perfectly acceptable for science students to simply opt out of being able to do as rudimentary an assignment as writing a two-page essay about themselves. This isn’t a thirty page advanced dissertation requiring months of research. It’s basically the teenage equivalent of “What I Did Last Summer.”
Writing is hard. Learning to write well takes sweat, tears, and time. Even learning to write adequately takes effort and talent. So let’s please stop giving a free pass to the people who don’t want to bother to learn this skill. Nobody should be allowed to graduate highschool, much less college, without being able to write. This is an essential part of education. It can’t be divorced even from the sciences, and people know this, which is why science and engineering students are still required to fulfill basic writing requirements for their majors. The trouble is that when they can’t actually fulfill them on their own, everyone looks the other way when they cheat.
This devalues education and writing for everyone and it is why liberals arts degrees are sneered at, often by those who can’t string three sentences together. This is why anyone who wants a job involving writing is expected to work for pennies, if not for free. Why should somebody get paid to do what no one, not even professors in the best universities, considers important or necessary?
English majors get paid $11 an hour in student tutoring centers to help engineering students with remedial English so they can graduate with world-class degrees and get some of the highest-paying jobs available. Science students are allowed to pass writing classes in some cases in spite of blatant plagiarism. Their bad writing is overlooked and ignored because hey, they don’t NEED to write.
At the very least, drop the pretense. Stop requiring writing of any kind from non-liberal arts majors. And stop requiring math and science from everyone else. This won’t help anyone achieve a well-rounded education, but at least it will be fair.
