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The Grumpy Grammarian

As an instructor of English Composition, I am naturally distressed by the number of basic errors (grammar, mechanics, usage) that I see in student papers.  I sometimes wonder whether they learned any rules at all in twelve years of school.  That is not, however, the most frustrating characteristic of student writing; it is not even the most damaging weakness.

Far more frustrating and damaging is that their essays make no sense.  It's as if the students are not thinking at all about what they are writing.  I can deal with garbled syntax; I can show the student what the problem is and demonstrate how the sentence might be restructured to express the intended idea more clearly and effectively.  I cannot, however, deal with muddled thinking.  When I haven't a clue what the student intends to say in the first place, I can do little except write "Say what?" or "Huh?" in the margin.

Of course, there is a direct correlation between correct grammar or usage and sense.  However, quite often I read sentences in which the grammar is correct and the words seem to be used properly, but the sentences still lack any meaning that I can figure out.  I begin to feel that the writer's brain is in some sort of parallel universe so that what makes sense to him or her doesn't make sense to me.

Ironically, I am not alone in this reaction.  When I ask my students to critique papers written by their peers, the most common criticism is, "It just doesn't make sense."  Sometimes it is harder for them to make sense of each other's papers than it is for me.  I, at least, have the tools to take a sentence with garbled syntax (but some sense behind it) and translate it.  They can't distinguish between a sentence that is merely garbled (and therefore "fixable") and one that is muddled from the get-go (and therefore "unfixable").

Another characteristic of student essays is that they are invariably wordy and repetitious in the extreme.  I know one of the reasons for this.  Educated in the "1,000 words or you fail" school of composition, students have become habituated to padding what they write.  To meet length requirements, they begin with, "In my personal opinion, I think . . . ," and ramble on until they end with, "In summary, my final conclusion is that . . . ."  Frequently, I can restate in about three short sentences what a student has written in a 500-word essay — without omitting anything significant.  If, perhaps, I omit a detail or two in my synopsis, it's a detail that wasn't relevant anyway but just served as more padding.

Once more, students are almost as adept as I am at recognizing this fault in their peers' essays.  When they critique other students' papers, "It's too wordy" is a criticism that they offer almost as often as "It doesn't make sense."  They are right.  Although some wordiness is to be expected in a first draft, and eliminating the deadwood requires self-editing, many students appear to go out of their way to be as long-winded and repetitious as possible.

These two faults – incoherence and wordiness – are related.  Unnecessary words make unclear ideas more confusing.  Adding more words to an already confusing sentence does not help to make it clearer.

Correctness is essential for effective writing, but it is only one of the "Five C's" of composition.  The other four are:  control, coherence, clarity, and conciseness.