Every year, we graduate millions of high school and college seniors, but a large proportion of these high school graduates are poor writers, and college graduates are not much better.  We are not referring to the ability to write stylistic, near-professional prose but to the ability to communicate in writing clearly and reasonably correctly.  Among high school graduates, the deficiency is as basic as the inability to put together a simple English sentence; among college graduates, it may be just as basic or may appear as the inability to write logically structured, coherent, and reasonably well-developed paragraphs.

Before looking at why this is, let's first establish that this is in fact the situation – that Johnny and Jane can't write.  The public is in denial.  Although many people are aware that many graduates lack writing skills, they are not aware – or do not want to admit – how enormous this deficiency is.  Possibly because they themselves have the same deficiencies, they have little basis for judgment.  More likely, however, they have not seen what these individuals produce when they do try to write.  If they do see samples of writing that illustrate frighteningly low levels of literacy, they think that these examples are the exceptions, not representative of what the vast majority can do.

I know otherwise.  I have taught English Composition part-time in a community college for more than fifteen years, an experience that has exposed me to the writing of approximately 1,000 students, all of them high school graduates.  I've read about 7,000 compositions.  Admittedly, a two-year community college does not draw many students of the same caliber as are drawn by major colleges and universities, but my colleagues at these institutions often express the same dismay as I do about students' poor writing, even citing some of the same specific, and very fundamental, deficiencies that I have noticed.  Indeed, I have spoken with graduate school professors who are aghast at how poorly their students write.

In addition, I have worked as the head of an editorial department in a company that has as its chief product written reports of survey research findings.  The authors of these reports are not only all college graduates but are people who have chosen an occupation in which writing is a major part of the work.  They are intelligent, well-spoken, often hard-working and ambitious – but their writing is usually poor, not just unclear and awkward but sometimes riddled with basic errors.  In fact, after I had been with the company for a few years, management assigned me the task of conducting workshops for all new employees who were involved in report preparation.  I found that, before we could even begin to discuss such sophisticated matters as report structure, I had to cover basic English grammar and syntax – material that one would have expected any college graduate to have mastered before embarking on a career that required writing.

Many of these individuals told me that they never studied writing in college, except for perhaps a watered-down freshman comp course, and some said that they had not really written much in their other college courses.  When they had, they said, their work was evaluated exclusively on the basis of content and not on how clearly that content was expressed.  As long as their professors could make out what they were trying to say (albeit with great difficulty), they got passing grades or better.

To return to the community college situation, it is also true that, though I do not see many students of the caliber who go directly to four-year institutions, I do not see the worst students either.  Like any college, the community college has placement tests, and students who score poorly on these tests are placed in noncredit remedial classes (euphemistically called "foundations courses" at the college where I teach) before they may enter the for-credit, required English Composition class (English 101).  Somewhere around a third to half of entering students (all high school graduates, mind you) place in these "remedial" or "foundations" English classes, which, by the way, they may pass if they can show that they have somehow learned to put together a few simple sentences.  Instructors cannot make the requirements much more demanding than that; if they did. most of these students would be sent packing.

My students in English 101 thus comprise those who have at least made a bare minimum on the placement test or have somehow passed a noncredit review course for which the standards are little more than what one could reasonably expect of an eighth-grader.  Consequently, the standards in the regular composition class slip.  As the instructor, I face a dilemma for which there is no simple solution.  I can teach the fundamentals that are still lacking (probably boring and alienating the few students who are beyond this point), or I can teach to the upper third or so of the class (causing most of the rest to flounder and fail).  Indeed, many of my colleagues choose the latter approach, refusing to teach grammar, mechanics, and sentence structure ("inappropriate on the college level").  A few don't even bother to mark the most egregious errors and judge students' essays almost purely on content.  Enabled by professors who ignore, or downplay the importance of, grammatical errors, faulty punctuation, incorrect usage or spelling, and the like, students may emerge from English 101 continuing to be unaware that their errors are errors.

Concurrently, grade inflation perpetuates itself.  I say "perpetuates" because grade inflation does not start at the college level; it has much earlier roots.  High school teachers pass with a "C" students who are barely literate; in fact, they may pass such students simply for showing up.  Standardized tests, though highly touted as a means of "accountability," do not prevent poorly prepared students from graduating, for a number of reasons:  they often do not involve actual writing, 12th-grade students may be required to display only 9th- or 10th-grade proficiency, and many schools grant diplomas anyway to students who don't pass the tests.  Colleges continue the charade by placing poor performers in "remedial" classes and subsequently pass all but a few up to the "regular" classes, despite their continuing deficiencies.  Gradually, if not rapidly, standard English 101 becomes not a college-level writing class but another "remedial" effort.

In this context, a satisfactory or passing grade ("C") in English 101 represents a minimal level of writing skill.  All it may signify is that the student knows how to write simple sentences (sometimes) without blatant mistakes in grammar and usage (or at least not very many).  A "B" (officially defined as "good") does not necessaily represent good writing by any stretch of the imagination but says only that the student is above the abysmal level of his or her poorly prepared peers.  An "A," which is supposed to signify superior or excellent work, may mean that the student does write well – or it may represent only superiority measured against an extremely low standard.  In the nation of the blind, even the partly sighted have 20-20 vision.

For many college graduates, perhaps for most, English 101 and 102 are the first and only college-level writing courses they take.  Even in other courses where some writing is required, few professors will evaluate or comment on their writing skills, as long as their work shows some understanding of the subject's content.  Once more, errors in writing and use of the language may go unmarked, and, once again, students may be blissfully ignorant of their mistakes or, more likely, adopt the view that writing need not be correct to be effective.  Indeed, they may conclude that writing even moderately well is not very important – a view that will place them firmly among the "enablers" who declare that the low level of lteracy in the nation is not a problem at all.

[Future parts of this discussion will discuss why writing is important and will suggest some solutions.]