The Righting of Writing

From kindergarten on up, Americans are wrestling with the word

The first time that Third-Grader Brian wrote a paper for his writing class in Atkinson, N.H., it began like this: "I have a problem with my ribs. If I get hurt on my left side I can't breathe." Prodded to think it out more carefully by his teacher, University of New Hampshire Education Professor Donald Graves, Brian realized he was trying to describe a past event, not a current pain. On his second attempt he wrote: "Once when I was in second grade, I was on a seesaw and fell off! I can't breathe!" Better, but Brian still had mixed up a past and a present tense. After another chat with Graves, he decided to carry his readers directly, and grammatically, back to the scene of his accident. This time he began his paper: "I couldn't talk! I was trying to say, 'I can't breathe!' "

Not fancy, perhaps, but each of Brian's successive drafts was clearer, better punctuated, more vivid and more conscious of his reader. These are the main goals of Graves, who, with a $240,000 grant from the National Institute of Education, teaches writing to elementary school pupils in a style more like that of a working editor than a stern grammarian. The experiment is part of a wave of writing reform that is sweeping through schools, colleges and businesses all over the U.S. In the age of talk shows, tape recorders, telephonitis and declining educational standards, the clearly written word is swiftly becoming a lost art. The many new courses attempting to correct that drift are concerned not with "creative" writing but with something almost as rare: clear, usable, everyday prose.

A notable step was taken in 1978, when Congress added writing to the list of topics eligible for Government grants. In the past year, requests for applications to get federal help for basic skills training soared from about 2,000 a year to 14,000. Last year the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) doled out $2.4 million for projects to improve writing, double the amount of the year before.

In Detroit, the high school system has introduced writing proficiency tests for graduates. All Detroit high school courses now require students to write at least two compositions a month. Ohio schools are offering Young Authors programs, Including publication of student writing and conferences at which they can discuss their work. More than 200,000 students from grades 1 through 12 in 35 states are engaged in the Individualized Language Arts program, funded by the Government. I.L.A. students meet two or three times a week, write short paragraphs on the same assigned topic, read them aloud, discuss possible improvements and then revise, often at greater length. The Bay Area Writing Project has spread from Berkeley, Calif., to 74 communities around the country. Its aim is to teach writing teachers how to teach writing. All sorts of methods are used, including the rewriting for clarity of long sentences by William Faulkner.

The academic assault on bad writing is strongest, and most varied, in the nation's colleges. "The buck is finally stopping with us," says William N. Free, a vice president at the University of Toledo. This semester, with 43 other top-level college administrators, Free attended a two-day workshop sponsored by the University of Iowa's Institute on Writing.

In some ways Iowa is the nerve center of writing reform and the source of the renaissance of clear collegiate prose. For the second year in a row, Iowa is running a six-month course for directors of freshman English programs from colleges all over the country, among them Dartmouth, Hollins and the Air Force Academy. The professors not only study writing and how to teach it, they write papers and are constantly subjected to criticism. One assignment this year: build a homemade anemometer to measure wind, then write a clear and concise report about how it works.

Re-experiencing the pangs of composition can be a humbling experience. Taking criticism from others is painful but useful. Concedes Beverly Been, director of freshman composition at Washington's Walla Walla College: "In the past all I cared about was that students produced a paper that was grammatically correct. It may, in fact, have said nothing."

Another goal of the Iowa program is to combat what the institute calls the "battered writer syndrome," i.e., student papers that are slashed with red pencil in the margins--awk for awkward phrase, dangle for dangling participles and modifiers--without any comments on substance. Says Iowa's David Hamilton: "Once you and the writer agree on what he is trying to say, then you can come to agreement about how to put it into form."

The Iowa institute is seeking commitment to curricular reform from a cross section of the nation's colleges. So far, 22 new freshman writing courses have resulted from the program. Beyond teaching techniques, the Iowa gospel is that writing instruction should not be confined to English departments. It must become a part of all college courses.

That approach, known as "writing across the curriculum," was first pioneered at Minnesota's Carleton College. It has been applied since 1977 by more than 60 faculty members at Beaver College, in Glenside, Pa. There, students practice writing in history, psychology (as they observe and describe the "Mama Rat" experiment in the lab), even mathematics classes, where they write word problems. So far, 400 schools and colleges have asked Beaver for details of the program. Observes Beaver Professor Elaine Maimon, 35: "In freshman composition, English teachers used to teach their favorite works of literature. We were not respecting the kinds of prose that our colleagues in other disciplines require of students."

In college English departments, the shift from an all-out study of literature to a more rigorous blend of literature and composition can be a shock to the faculty. At the University of Texas' Austin campus, half the students in the 1960s were excused from fulfilling the freshman English requirement. Today that group has dipped to 28%. To staff the 256 sections of freshman English now required at the sprawling state campus. Liberal Arts Dean Robert King has ordered all English professors to teach one composition course annually. So far, none has carried out initial threats to quit from overwork.

Duke University has plans to require English composition for all freshmen regardless of entering grades or Scholastic Aptitude Test scores. But the battle does not end with the freshman year. Dartmouth recently discovered that the skill of some students who did well in freshman writing actually declined in the next three years, so lax were the college writing requirements.

One new technique for teaching writing is something called "sentence combining." Instead of analyzing essays or mastering general principles, students learn writing and organization by building paragraphs from collections of dozens of related sentences ("The train arrives at the station": "The station is crowded"). One study of 300 freshmen at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, found that students trained by this method wrote significantly better than a control group. Sentence combining can be used at all age levels. A program called Success, developed at Duke, teaches second-and third-graders how to read and write using vocabulary from newspapers. Before writing their own paragraphs, they compose paragraphs together, with the teacher at the blackboard acting as secretary.

In part because these and other writing reforms are so late in coming, businesses increasingly find it necessary to set up their own writing programs. It is not merely that secretaries tend not to know how to spell. M.B.A.s with degrees from prestigious colleges cannot write clear letters, memos or reports. "Communications training is one of the hottest areas in the corporate field today," says Nate Rosenblatt, a vice president of a new and thriving New Jersey-based company called Learn Inc. One of Learn's big pedagogic sellers--to personnel at RCA and E.F

Hutton, among others--is a packaged seminar called Power Writing. Sample exercises: write a thank-you letter or a memo with a "dynamic" and "relevant" opening; write a rejection on a business proposal with sympathy and understanding. One corrective exercise asks, "Did you find rewriting the cliches easy?" At $89.95 each, the firm has sold upwards of 10,000 Power Writing kits, each of which contains workbooks, a dictionary, a thesaurus and four audio cassettes. American Telephone and Telegraph has budgeted an estimated $2 million to provide a customized version of the Power Writing course for 20 Bell System offices throughout the nation.

Behind the push by business to improve employee writing is a recognition that bad writing costs money. "We can't do anything with their engineering if they can't explain it to us," says an Amoco supervisor in Wyoming. "I don't have time to fiddle around with their ideas unless they've worked them into shape." As Gene Cartwright, a manager at Standard Oil of Indiana, puts it, "Companies are built around reports." Robert L. Craig, an official of the American Society for Training and Development, goes further. Poor writing, he insists, is a significant "factor in the whole drop in the growth of American productivity."

Like employees elsewhere, most of those who enroll at the Sun Institute for the Sun Co. course called Write Up the Ladder suffer from lack of confidence about writing basic memos and letters. "They hate to be straightforward or direct," says George Murphy, one of the Villanova University English professors who handle the course. Says Bonnie Perry, a Sun education director: "Their idea of what constitutes good writing is something that is excessively pompous and stilted. They go on and on, never getting to the point."

Few of the suggested ways to improve writing are truly new. What is new is the national conviction that something must be done about writing, and the challenge of trying to spread writing skills widely throughout a society as diverse as the U.S.'s. As Richard Lloyd-Jones, associate director of the Iowa institute, observes, "In the 12th century, you could have 50 to 100 scribes take care of all the business of the Court of Chancery in England. Only in the 20th century have we had the notion that everyone needs to be able to do it. Until now we have not really faced the problem of how to pass on writing by means other than one-to-one apprenticeship."

The fuss over writing skill means one thing at least: students will write more. And that fact alone is significant, whatever the quality of instruction and the classroom method. Writing experts frequently quote an apt Latin proverb: scribendo disces scribere. It means that by writing one learns to write.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.