YOU WON’T SEE THIS EVERYDAY…
H&OES defending the g-schools against a detractor.
Diane at Nobody Knows Anything sent a link to an LA Times diatribe against the five-paragraph essay and computer-grading.
The thoroughly modern grade-A public-school prose style is not creative or interesting enough even to be wrong. The people who create and enforce the templates are, not to put too fine a point on it, people without understanding or imagination, lobotomized weasels for whom any effort of thought exceeds their strength. I recently read one of the many boilerplate descriptions of how students should write their essays. “The penultimate sentence,” it said, “should restate your basic thesis of the essay.” Well, who says? And why?
The teaching of writing as a machine procedure gains momentum by the day. In Indiana this year, the junior-year English essay will be graded by computer, and similar experiments have been tried in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts and Oregon. The SAT and the ACT are planning to test the new computer-grading software as well. That is a reductio ad absurdum of the entire idea of learning. If this is knowledge, then truth and beauty reside only in ignorance.
I think the author, who teaches at Dickinson College, is just plain wrong here and doesn’t understand how to teach. Sure, the five-paragraph essay is formulaic and can lead to stilted writing. Just like don’t start a sentence with a conjunction is formulaic. Did you catch that last sentence? I broke the rule. Intentionally. I don’t kid myself that I’m a good writer, but I know (most of) the rules and how they can be bent or broken. But, the rules have to be learned first. And that means formulae and essays that may be just plain boring. It’s a process: crawl, walk, run. The professor doesn’t seem to care about seeing that his charges actually learn how to write; he just doesn’t want to read bad essays.
I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today; if the world goes to hell I don’t really care. But I do care about coming to the middle of a semester and being forced, in order to make a living, to read 35 five-page papers written by thoroughly fried lamb chops whose writing style has been nurtured over the years by a computer.
I’d suggest that Crispin Sartwell is in the wrong line of work. Since he only wants to read great essays by polished writers, perhaps the position as Editorial Page editor of a major metropolitan newspaper would be more up his alley. I wonder if the LA Times is hiring.