In this piece at popecenter.org, George Leef writes about the disturbing reality that many college students are unable to write a paper.
Teaching students to write is an onerous task and many professors don’t do it because they don’t have to. They’re happy to enter into what Professor Murray Sperber dubs “the faculty/student non-aggression pact,” which entails the professor making the course not-too-demanding on the students, but in return not putting very much effort into the course. That means, among other things, assigning few papers and certainly not devoting a lot of time to rigorously critiquing them.
In this article Sperber wrote for the Pope Center in 2011, he lamented that the writing demands on students has fallen considerably. More important, however, than the decline in the quantity of writing, is the decline in the quality of the work professors do with their students’ papers.
Many faculty members are content merely to jot down a brief comment or two about a paper and hardly any go through a paper line by line to correct writing mistakes. Sperber explains that they “justify their indifference to dreadful student writing by saying that when reading a paper, they mainly want to ascertain whether the student understands the ideas in the course…. Content alone matters, not how well the student has expressed it.”
Yes, but that approach is also much easier than line-by-line editing.
What is really sad is that writing forces one to think through arguments and construct them logically, which I think is why way too many of today’s policy “arguments” tend to be mere emotional rants that haven’t undergone the scrutiny required when one writes down thoughts.
