Our Students Can’t Write. We Have Ourselves to Blame.

For the past two years, word salads have been the plat du jour at the White House. A staple of our national conversation, our president’s bursts of words, as dissimilar and disconnected from one another as the items on a Denny’s salad and dessert bar, have been a source of debate for linguists, ridicule for comedians, concern for psychologists, and despair for translators.

But professors in the humanities know Donald Trump does not have exclusive dibs on all-you-can-read word salads. I, for one, spend my semesters picking through the salads tossed and served up as papers by my students. Consider the opening paragraph from a paper I received this semester. The student, who chose to write on Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons, begins: “Bazarov’s story is the tragic existence of a man who could not exist. That statement is not finite. It only applies to Bazarov in the time period he exists and to his maturity because Bazarov’s nihilism is intermingled with passions.”

This particular paper — written by a senior majoring in English and journalism — is a tad less coherent than others. Yet most of the papers are bedeviled by a host of grammatical and analytical problems, as if they were composed from word-salad bars that overflow with diced sentences and sliced syntax, stale phrases and failed analogies, and dressings that cover the full range of opinions (yet not a single serving of textual analysis). As for the staples of paper writing, including the basic punctuation of sentences and the clear organization of ideas, they are almost nowhere to be found.

Of course, this is hardly news. A few years ago, The Chronicle published a widely commented essay by Joseph R. Teller, a professor of English at the College of the Sequoias. Despite the different pedagogical approaches he had tried over the years, Teller found that students in his composition courses still couldn’t write a “clear sentence to save their lives.” He concluded that the only way to help them save their lives, or at least write a clear sentence, was to focus on form, not content. Though he would like “to teach my students to love justice, be passionate about politics, and think deeply about the future of humanity,” he announced, “they are not legitimate outcomes of a writing course.”

While I share Teller’s experiences and exasperation, I am in a rather different situation. Like Teller, I am not in the business of teaching my students to love justice or think deeply about the future of humanity. Instead, my job as a historian is to teach students to trace the changing nature of justice and think deeply about humanity’s past.

Unlike Teller, though, I am not in the business of teaching composition. Or, at least, that is what I long told myself. When I was a graduate student in European history, I was not trained to teach this subject. (In fact, I was not trained to teach at all, but that is another story.) As a tenure-track professor, I was not encouraged to learn to teach writing skills. How would I have been? My tenure, after all, depended not on editing student papers, but on finding a publisher who would edit my manuscript for publication. Now that I am a tenured professor, my professional status and salary are based on … well, need I finish this sentence?

In effect, I publish and something else perishes — namely, the ability of my students to write.

Of course, colleges are aware of the problem and are taking steps to deal with it. At my university, for example, we have a program called “Writing in the Disciplines,” which identifies courses, offered in several different colleges, as writing intensive. As students are required to take a certain number of these courses, our mission seems accomplished.

But as someone who has taught many such classes over the years, yet still wrestles with garbled papers written by upper-division students, I doubt the effectiveness of such programs. With apologies to La Rochefoucauld, they mostly seem little more than the tribute vice pays to virtue. What could be more virtuous, quite literally, than teaching students to find the right word and phrase for an idea or insight? To better inform and perhaps even better form themselves?

Institutions of higher learning, by creating such programs, have acknowledged the problem we face. The mere existence of writing centers and clinics seems to recognize a fundamental paradox: We cannot pretend to engage in higher learning if our students write at an eighth-grade level. Yet, as individual faculty members, we mostly make do by assigning more tests than we do papers (and watch more films than we read books). When we do assign papers, we mostly limit ourselves to scrawling a couple of comments at the bottom of the paper. By way of peroration, we might urge the student to pay a visit to the writing center. Such centers, however, are as easily abused as used, often reduced to the pedagogical equivalent of the confessional, a place where students are absolved, not cured, of their writing sins.

There is, of course, no single answer to this crisis. On the one hand, it is tempting to act at a national level. Why not the domestic equivalent of, say, the Marshall Plan? Such a bold plan, whose one goal would be to teach America’s youth how to write — and, thus, how to think — seems more critical than ever. While our current administration would never think of funding such a plan, the private sector might think otherwise. According to one study, more than 90 percent of business leaders believe one’s ability to write well is more important than one’s particular major. Just as with the government in 1948, so too with corporations today: Plowing money into such programs would be an act of enlightened self-interest.

On the other hand, thinking nationally is useless if we do not also act locally. Colleges would need to reward tenured professors who retooled as composition teachers and reassure tenure-line professors that teaching writing is as important as writing monographs. Equally crucial, writing-intensive courses must become the norm, not the exception, over the entire course of a four-year education. To limit the teaching of English composition to first-year students makes no more sense than to teach adolescents the virtues of restraint before unleashing them at a gaming parlor.

Similarly, it makes no sense for those of us who teach in the humanities to lambaste the word salads of our president while we do little more than lament the word salads of our students. It is up to us, at the end of the day, to insist on a proper menu.

Robert Zaretsky is a professor of world cultures and literatures in the department of modern and classical languages and the Honors College at the University of Houston. His latest book is Catherine & Diderot: The Empress, the Philosopher, and the Fate of the Enlightenment (Harvard University Press, 2019).