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Don't count on osmosis to impart written language skills
James Allan
11 April 2007
The Australian
Copyright 2007 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved
Leading legal academic James Allan laments that his A-grade university students are deficient in basic literacy and English grammar
ANY disinterested observer would say that the world is better today, on average, than it has ever been. People are living longer, much longer. They have more to eat. They can travel more. They have more leisure. They have more interesting jobs. A far, far smaller percentage of them are stuck as subsistence farmers. And however much things have improved for men in the past century or two, they are three or four times better again for women, at least in the Western world.
If anyone seriously wanted to debate that basic claim with a straight face, I'd be happy to do so, preferably for lots of money. I mention it simply because normally it is just out and out false to paint former times -- 30, 40 or 50 years ago even -- as some sort of golden age when things were so much better than today.
Most jeremiads, or doleful laments about the failings of the here and now, are fairly implausible, to put it as kindly as possible. Rarely do these mournful denunciations of the present stand up to comparative testing.
And yet there is one area of life I am intimately aware of where the falling standards grievance appears to be clearly correct. I am talking about university students and their basic grasp of literacy and grammar.
And let me be abundantly clear that I am talking about some of the best university students in the country. These are not just any students. They are what can properly be described as elite students, the very top high school students in all of Queensland who have managed to pass through a winnowing process that the vast preponderance of their fellow high school students fails to get through. It is extremely difficult to get into the law school at my university and the students who manage to do so have some of the best marks, and minds, in Australia.
Yet lots and lots of these highly intelligent tertiary students lack basic grammar knowledge. Forget gerunds or the subjunctive. They cannot cope with basic sentence construction. They use semicolons and colons without the faintest idea of how they should be used, and on a seemingly random basis. The possessive apostrophe is either wholly absent, is regularly confused with the abbreviating apostrophe, is sprinkled around in the hope of getting it correct once in a while (giving the reader such treats as the possessive its'), or all of the above.
Definite and indefinite articles are regularly omitted. Run-on sentences are commonplace. And it's not even an exaggeration to say that a few of them don't seem to realise that you need a verb to make a sentence, that "Being the prime minister" doesn't quite cut it.
Quite simply, my elite law students, or a good many of them at any rate, have been provided with almost no technical writing and English grammar skills. One must assume that the same is true of virtually all Australian school leavers.
Nor are these particularly challenging skills to acquire. All of my students have the intelligence to learn them in two or three weeks, in my view. They have quite literally, or so I hear on occasion, never been taught these things. Why not? It could be, I suppose, that these skills are no longer considered important. More crucial, on this view, is the fostering of children's (or should we now say childrens?) creativity and self-esteem. But if that, or some similar notion, is one of the reasons so many tertiary students seem to have atrocious writing skills, let me give you the other side of the story.
No one can think at all without language and its labels, categories and generalisations. It follows that no one can think clearly unless they can use language clearly. To make a subtle point or introduce a fine distinction, one needs the tools that a complex and sophisticated language offers. Nor does a knowledge of these complexities and sophistications curtail creativity. Jane Austen was a master of English grammar. And what would Winston Churchill's speeches have been had he not had a superb grasp of the language?
Of course, one might think clarity, precision, irony, humour and even a fully developed capacity for self-expression must bow down before the need to foster students' self-esteem or creative urges. Personally, though, I've never come across any very creative writers -- be they political commentators, authors of fiction, historians, what have you -- whose grasp of basics was deficient.
Worse, or at least ironically, the absence of sound writing skills may well, in adult life, serve to lessen one's self-esteem. It may make it harder to get a job or a promotion, or may make one feel inarticulate and dumb.
Take law, my profession. Lawyers spend their working lives manipulating language. They draft contracts, wills, articles of incorporation and myriad sorts of letters. They argue in court. They interpret statutes. They pick over the words of judges in past cases. Their job revolves around the expert use of language. Of course a solid grounding in basic English skills is a huge advantage to them, and to many, many others.
Alas, a more depressing possibility in getting basic grammar skills taught today may be that a sizeable chunk of our recently graduated teachers may not know these skills themselves. Years of the osmosis school of learning to write, where you just cross your fingers and pray that by reading enough some ineffable and mysterious process will kick in and people will magically pick it up, may be coming home to roost.
That wouldn't be much of a surprise, would it? Merely to state the osmosis approach shows how ridiculous it is.
James Allan, a professor of law at the University of Queensland, has taught at universities in New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong.
James Allan
11 April 2007
The Australian
Copyright 2007 News Ltd. All Rights Reserved
Leading legal academic James Allan laments that his A-grade university students are deficient in basic literacy and English grammar
ANY disinterested observer would say that the world is better today, on average, than it has ever been. People are living longer, much longer. They have more to eat. They can travel more. They have more leisure. They have more interesting jobs. A far, far smaller percentage of them are stuck as subsistence farmers. And however much things have improved for men in the past century or two, they are three or four times better again for women, at least in the Western world.
If anyone seriously wanted to debate that basic claim with a straight face, I'd be happy to do so, preferably for lots of money. I mention it simply because normally it is just out and out false to paint former times -- 30, 40 or 50 years ago even -- as some sort of golden age when things were so much better than today.
Most jeremiads, or doleful laments about the failings of the here and now, are fairly implausible, to put it as kindly as possible. Rarely do these mournful denunciations of the present stand up to comparative testing.
And yet there is one area of life I am intimately aware of where the falling standards grievance appears to be clearly correct. I am talking about university students and their basic grasp of literacy and grammar.
And let me be abundantly clear that I am talking about some of the best university students in the country. These are not just any students. They are what can properly be described as elite students, the very top high school students in all of Queensland who have managed to pass through a winnowing process that the vast preponderance of their fellow high school students fails to get through. It is extremely difficult to get into the law school at my university and the students who manage to do so have some of the best marks, and minds, in Australia.
Yet lots and lots of these highly intelligent tertiary students lack basic grammar knowledge. Forget gerunds or the subjunctive. They cannot cope with basic sentence construction. They use semicolons and colons without the faintest idea of how they should be used, and on a seemingly random basis. The possessive apostrophe is either wholly absent, is regularly confused with the abbreviating apostrophe, is sprinkled around in the hope of getting it correct once in a while (giving the reader such treats as the possessive its'), or all of the above.
Definite and indefinite articles are regularly omitted. Run-on sentences are commonplace. And it's not even an exaggeration to say that a few of them don't seem to realise that you need a verb to make a sentence, that "Being the prime minister" doesn't quite cut it.
Quite simply, my elite law students, or a good many of them at any rate, have been provided with almost no technical writing and English grammar skills. One must assume that the same is true of virtually all Australian school leavers.
Nor are these particularly challenging skills to acquire. All of my students have the intelligence to learn them in two or three weeks, in my view. They have quite literally, or so I hear on occasion, never been taught these things. Why not? It could be, I suppose, that these skills are no longer considered important. More crucial, on this view, is the fostering of children's (or should we now say childrens?) creativity and self-esteem. But if that, or some similar notion, is one of the reasons so many tertiary students seem to have atrocious writing skills, let me give you the other side of the story.
No one can think at all without language and its labels, categories and generalisations. It follows that no one can think clearly unless they can use language clearly. To make a subtle point or introduce a fine distinction, one needs the tools that a complex and sophisticated language offers. Nor does a knowledge of these complexities and sophistications curtail creativity. Jane Austen was a master of English grammar. And what would Winston Churchill's speeches have been had he not had a superb grasp of the language?
Of course, one might think clarity, precision, irony, humour and even a fully developed capacity for self-expression must bow down before the need to foster students' self-esteem or creative urges. Personally, though, I've never come across any very creative writers -- be they political commentators, authors of fiction, historians, what have you -- whose grasp of basics was deficient.
Worse, or at least ironically, the absence of sound writing skills may well, in adult life, serve to lessen one's self-esteem. It may make it harder to get a job or a promotion, or may make one feel inarticulate and dumb.
Take law, my profession. Lawyers spend their working lives manipulating language. They draft contracts, wills, articles of incorporation and myriad sorts of letters. They argue in court. They interpret statutes. They pick over the words of judges in past cases. Their job revolves around the expert use of language. Of course a solid grounding in basic English skills is a huge advantage to them, and to many, many others.
Alas, a more depressing possibility in getting basic grammar skills taught today may be that a sizeable chunk of our recently graduated teachers may not know these skills themselves. Years of the osmosis school of learning to write, where you just cross your fingers and pray that by reading enough some ineffable and mysterious process will kick in and people will magically pick it up, may be coming home to roost.
That wouldn't be much of a surprise, would it? Merely to state the osmosis approach shows how ridiculous it is.
James Allan, a professor of law at the University of Queensland, has taught at universities in New Zealand, Canada and Hong Kong.
