- Put a different message on your body every day with a Blackboard T-Shirt!
- The news from “higher” education about literacy really is not so good. via the Exploding Aardvark.
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omg sarcasm
The news from “higher” education about literacy really is not so good.
WELL. Not so WELL.
*rolls eyes*
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Re: omg sarcasm
Um, no. “The news is not so well” just doesn’t happen to cut it in the English language.
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I need that T-shirt in the worst way. I never buy message Ts b/c I always have a new complaint. How come we can’t get it here? Why didn’t I know about this before going to Japan?
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Now I know my (a)(b)©’s.
«He and other researchers agreed there was significantly more work to be done to determine whether (a) colleges are taking students who have been significantly underprepared by their previous schools, (b) the colleges are failing to catch those students up, or © both.»
Proofreading as a trade has just plain evaporated in the past fifteen years. This article both demonstrates and explains that.
I still wonder what the reason is for this decline in literacy. It’s one of those odd causal spirals — people read less, so they’re less practiced at it, so it’s harder to do, so they do it less, etc.; and then that inexperience at reading only makes the work of learning to write all the more difficult and frustrating.
And certainly it turns the mechanics of punctuation and grammar from something one absorbed fairly easily from reading and then just fine-tuned with formal instruction in elementary school and junior high, into something totally arcane and unlearnable; and that feeling makes it even easier for curricula to sidetrack, defer, and eventually dismiss every approach to writing other than the unstructured spraying of one’s feeeeelings onto paper. (Rousseau’s noble savage would never stop to consider his commas!)
The iteration of this process across a few generations has produced a perfect impasse: the complex art of nonfiction writing, as a mix of clarity and reasoning and aesthetics, is taught poorly by people to whom it was never taught well, according to unsuccessful curricula designed by people who have only ever known unsuccessful curricula. When students learn, it is in spite of this deadlock. It is confounding and compounding.
We are all the Jamaican bobsled team.
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