On Writing, Teaching, and Blogging

I'm working on a large non-blog project, so blogging will continue to be lighter than normal until Friday. But with the advent of blogging and email, most of us probably write more today than we did ten years ago. All that writing (and, hopefully, reading) should alert us to grammar. Yes, grammar, and the degree to which the New Media has allowed non-journalists to send their thoughts around the world editor-free. I'm not objecting to that, mind you, just taking note of it and the consequences it has on the quality of writing.

A small prediction: As blogging becomes more mainstream, bloggers will pay closer attention to the quality of their writing. When huge stories are breaking, as with Rathergate, scrambling will trump carefully crafted composition, and that's not altogether bad given the medium and its primary strengths (speed, few rules). But as the shake-down of bloggers continues, and as the talent pool grows, the scoops and critiques that have made bloggers all the rage will need to be conveyed through well written blogs that, while not formal essays, reflect a level of professionalism that's heretofore been rare.

In other words, think fast, write fast, write well.

Erin O'Connor at Critical Mass has some pertinent observations on this matter, since her young students today are probably little different from those of the past many years. Plus, I suspect, her experience is quite similar to that of teachers and former teachers around the country.

"My colleague and I distributed the worksheet as an informal diagnostic, a way of gauging just where on the grammar curve our students are. What we discovered did not surprise us particularly. I won't discuss details for reasons that should be obvious, but I will say that after ten years of teaching, I am moved to generalize: Most high school students these days are not on the grammar curve at all. The parts of speech are largely mysterious to them; the rules of punctuation and agreement are likewise unfamiliar. Semi-colons, colons, and dashes do not come into play in their writing because they do not know what they are for. Sentence fragments abound because many do not know that a sentence requires a subject and a verb, nor can they tell reliably when something is a subject and when something is a verb. Forget about objects and indirect objects, simple and compound sentences, subordinate clauses and participial phrases: such terminology is Greek to the vast majority of them.

"Don't get me wrong. Kids today are as smart, creative, and sharp as ever. Their grammar deficit is not their fault. They can't be blamed for what they were never taught. It's increasingly unfashionable to emphasize grammar and the rules of syntax in school, the reasons ranging from the hang-loose notion that the rules of usage are confining and binding and irrelevant anyway since language is a living, breathing thing, to the feel-good notion that grammar is boring and mind-numbing and kids will be turned off to reading and writing forever if they have to learn it."

If you've taught writing at the college level, and I've been privileged to teach some pretty high-octane students, you know that the very best are eager to know why their writing isn't what it should be and what they should do to improve it. Re-writing is the answer, along with strict grading; the last thing any student needs is an undeserved pass lest their tender psyches be crushed.

That's a real problem on most campuses (and I know Erin is talking about high school students, but the differences aren't great, at least for college freshmen), because so many professors aren't willing to spend the time it takes to work with students to polish essays. To boot, if you've picked up a copy of just about any academic journal, you'll know that academics are often terrible writers who rely on jargon and cant to speak to a small audience while excluding non-guild members.

Which is why I think blogging can become a means to improving the way thinking Americans write: Our medium demands that we satisfy a broad audience of non-specialists. We're the anti-academics, in that sense, even though many of the best bloggers are themselves professors. That is, the worst vices of the modern professoriate can be overcome (or just ignored) by bloggers. And the same can be said of the clan of professional journalists, who've learned a thing or two from bloggers these past few weeks.

So bloggers, clean up your prose, omit needless words, and watch your punctuation. Buy Strunk and White, digest it, and make it your own. And remember that professionalism doesn't have to mean professionalization.