President Barack Obama's recent State of the Union address invited many pressing questions. Who would sit next to whom? When would John Boehner cry, and how hard? And oh yeah, there was all that policy stuff thrown in as well. Obama did an admirable job of focusing on education — the need for teachers to get the kind of respect they get in South Korea, the infeasibility of getting by with just a high school degree in a globalized world and, of course, the nation's slipping competitiveness in math and science.
No one can deny that last point. According to the most recent Nation's Report Card, a Department of Education survey on grade-level proficiency in various subjects, only 21 percent of twelfth-graders nationwide were proficient in science in 2009 — 26 percent were proficient in math. These findings are troubling to anyone who cares about America's ability to compete in a post-industrial knowledge economy, and they should be.
But did you know there are subjects other than math and science? I've already held forth enough in this space on the importance of history — and literature and the arts are equally vital (not to mention foreign languages, which were oddly left out in all that talk about global competition). But there is one skill that is at the root of success in many disciplines, and in the world at large: writing.
Yes, writing. You can't communicate the importance of your scientific breakthrough without it; chances are, you can't even get the funding for your important scientific breakthrough unless you can convince a benefactor, in writing, that it's worthwhile. Yet only 24 percent of twelfth-graders were found to be proficient in writing — just the cohort that will soon be heading off to college.
"But not to Brown, surely!" you say. I certainly don't mean to imply that only 24 percent of Brown students meet the national proficiency standards for writing; that would be an absurd figure. I'm sure that 99 percent of Brown students are capable of writing a paper. After all, isn't Brown's sole requirement a demonstrated proficiency in writing?
All true, but as someone who's seen a lot of student compositions, I have come to an unfortunate conclusion: Even a school like Brown has a lot of embarrassingly bad writing going on. Good writing doesn't necessarily have to be poetic or demonstrate the author's impressive vocabulary, but it does need to get a message across in a clear, well-organized fashion. This seems simple, yet being capable of writing a paper isn't the same as being capable of writing a good paper.
I've had the amazing privilege of seeing the work of my peers in a lot of contexts: as a Writing Fellow, a Herald Opinions editor, a member of workshop classes in literary arts, creative non-fiction and history and a person to whom friends come with rough drafts. I call it a privilege because students have offered up their unvarnished work to another student's judgment, which can be a scary and painful thing to do, and I've become a better reader and writer for it. A lot of their work has been truly excellent. Some has needed work. And some has been pretty atrocious.
It would be vicious and unnecessary to give quoted examples of some of the bad writing I have encountered over the years, not to mention a breach of trust. I also recognize that almost everything I read is a first draft and the final product is likely significantly improved. But trust me when I assure you that bad writing is out there.
I'm not talking about minor grammatical errors here. I'm talking about a style of writing that actively impedes the reader's ability to understand what the author is trying to communicate. On the one hand, we have babbling incoherence — pieces that switch topics every other paragraph and are populated by fragments, non-sequiturs and truly creative syntax. On the other hand, we have academic incoherence — long, verbose sentences strung together in hopes of obscuring the fact that the author isn't entirely sure about what he or she is writing. Unfortunately, students at a school like Brown sometimes learn the latter from their class readings and even their own professors.
Good writing is hard to teach, but it can also be extremely rewarding for students to master, since it develops creativity, analytical skills and individual style. And as our generation enters the workforce, employers are not going to be impressed by our ability to write in txt-speak. Would a little emphasis on writing in the nation's schools be too much to ask?
Maybe we should focus solely on math education in a globalized world; as Cady Heron poetically put it in Mean Girls: "Math is the same in every co
untry." Maybe it doesn't matter, since soon enough we'll all be writing in Chinese anyway. But even then, the skills that we learn when we learn how to write — clarity, organization and the recognition of an audience that must be persuaded — can stay with us throughout our lives.
Former Herald Opinions editor Sarah Rosenthal '11 may have just
out-snobbed herself.
