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<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite>May 15, 2005<br>
<font size=6><b>The Fine Art of Getting It Down on Paper, Fast<br>
</b></font>By <font color="#000066"><u>BRENT STAPLES</u></font> <br>
<font size=5>Imagine yourself a senior partner in a large accounting firm
that has just hired a promising analyst from a top-tier college. You
negotiate a generous salary and spend a fortune moving the new employee
to an office in a distant city - only to find that he can't write a lick.
He crunches numbers well enough and clearly knows the principles of
accounting. But like many otherwise bright, well-educated people, he was
never trained to express his thoughts in words. The blood drains from
your face as you read that first audit report, which is so poorly
structured as to be unintelligible.<br>
These kinds of disappointments have a long history in the corporate
world. Companies once covered for poor writers by surrounding them with
people who could translate their thoughts onto paper. But this strategy
has proved less practical in the bottom-line-driven information age,
which requires more high-quality writing from more categories of
employees than ever before. Instead of covering for nonwriters, companies
are increasingly looking for ways to screen them out at the door. <br>
This was clearly the subtext message of a report released last year by
the National Commission on Writing, a panel of educators convened by the
College Board. At the heart of the report - titled "Writing: A
Ticket to Work ... or a Ticket Out" - is an eye-opening assessment
of corporate attitudes about writing, surveying members of the Business
Roundtable, an association of chief executives from the nation's leading
corporations. <br>
The findings, though given a positive gloss, were not encouraging. About
a third of the companies reported that only one-third or fewer of their
employees knew how to write clearly and concisely. The companies
expressed a fair degree of dissatisfaction with the writing produced by
recent college graduates - even though many were blue-chip companies that
get the pick of the litter. <br>
The poor writing found among both new and established employees has
turned business leaders into champions of education reform and of the No
Child Left Behind Education Act, which aims to strengthen public schools
and erase the achievement gap between rich and poor children. But
persuading schools to improve math and reading instruction, even in
exchange for federal dollars, has proved difficult. Persuading schools to
rethink the teaching of writing - those that teach it at all - is going
to be a lot harder. <br>
The depth of the resistance to common-sense writing reforms became clear
in April, when the National Council of Teachers of English attacked the
College Board for adding a writing segment to the SAT, the college
entrance exam required by an overwhelming majority of America's four-year
colleges and universities. The test, which consists of a brief, timed
essay and a multiple-choice section, has already put schools and parents
on notice that writing instruction needs to improve.<br>
The English teachers, however, have other ideas. The group questioned the
validity of the tests and trotted out the condescending notion that
requiring poor and minority students to write in standard English is
unfair because of their cultural backgrounds and vernacular languages.
This is sadly reminiscent of the "Ebonics" proposal of the
1990's, in which misguided educators supported the appalling notion that
street slang was as good or better than the standard tongue and should be
given credence in student work produced for school.<br>
The council also tried to discredit the idea of timed writing tests. The
report seemed to suggest that the only way to judge writing was to
consider student work that had been rewritten and edited over longer
periods of time. Long-term projects are important, but they do not cover
all of the kinds of writing that students will be called upon to produce
either in college or in their lives. On the contrary, substantive writing
on demand for reports, correspondence and even e-mail is now a common
feature of corporate life.<br>
The teachers also seemed to feel that only other English teachers were
qualified to judge what good writing is. The evidence suggests, however,
that most teachers have never taken a course in how to teach effective
writing and that many don't know how to produce it themselves. <br>
The blame lies not with the teachers, however, but with an American
educational system that fails at every level to produce the fluent
writers required by the new economy. To change that, the state colleges
of education that produce most teachers will need to improve writing
instruction courses and require all students to take them. The time
devoted to writing instruction in kindergarten through 12th grade needs
to be more skillfully used and doubled, at the very least. <br>
The English teachers are right when they note that we live in a
test-obsessed culture that puts far too much weight on the SAT. The test
is supposed to be used as one element among many in deciding who enters
college. But the test developers have performed an important service by
bringing writing to the top of the national agenda.<br>
What we need now is a revolution in writing instruction, not just another
test prep exercise. <br><br>
</font><div align="center"><font face="Symbol">·<x-tab> </x-tab></font><font size=2 color="#000066"><u>Copyright
2005</u></font><font size=2> </font><font size=2 color="#000066"><u>The
New York Times Company</u></font><font size=2> <br>
</font></div>
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