...many seem to have received little writing instruction in high school. I initially noticed this as an undergraduate English major at Yale, where I helped peers revise their papers. I saw it again in graduate school at Tufts, where I taught freshman writing classes. And it has also struck me at Babson, where, for the past two years, I have instructed first-year students.
The second thing English teachers realize is that correcting students’ papers is tremendously time consuming. I constantly do battle with myself to spend less than 20 minutes on a paper. At meetings, instructors are often urged not to exceed 15 minutes, but I frequently end up spending double that. This can be a genuinely frustrating experience: 50 papers stacked on the coffee table, 10 in the finished pile, and an entire afternoon gone.
It's not just you, Professor! And OS is loathe to lay the blame totally at the feet of the schools. Families that consume good books on a regular basis produce children who can write. Families that don't, don't.
Think about it. Your high school sophomore has no memory of a culture without personal computers, internet, hip-hop music, or Miley Cyrus. Given the distractions, it's tough to insist on Shakespeare, Hemingway and Dickens. But it's gotta be done, lest we all end up with this:
