[Englecturers] Fwd: NY Times Article

[englecturers at lists.ucr.edu]

>May 15, 2005
>The Fine Art of Getting It Down on Paper, Fast
>By BRENT STAPLES
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>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.
>What we need now is a revolution in writing instruction, not just another 
>test prep exercise.
>
>·       Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
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