Wow. You call me a liar and accuse me of defamation all in one short post.
I didn't say they were all grammatically incorrect (though some were) or that they weren't serious works of legitimate scholarship, though IMO some weren't. I said they were lousy writing. And by the terms of good expository writing, they almost universally were. In many cases the papers appeared written more to impress than to inform. The authors used passive tense and convoluted sentence constructions extensively and unnecessarily. They were drawn to long, Latinate words where short, simple words would have served them better. (If they had all discarded their thesaruses before starting they would have been better off.) They wrote sentences which, when analyzed carefully, simply made no sense, or when diagrammed proved to be grammatically incorrect. Incorrect parallel construction was one frequent problem; confusion of antecedents was another. My students, once (if) they were able to figure out the meaning of a paragraph, which often took several readings through (not because the topic was sophisticated or difficult, but because the writing was obtuse), were almost always able to write it more clearly and directly than the original. By this I don't mean simplistically; I insisted that all the meaning and nuance of the original be retained. But the writers seemed ignorant of the simple principle that the purpose of expository writing is to be understood, and that it is the writer's obligation to make him- or herself understandable.
I will agree that in terms of typical academic writing, their writing often fit in quite well. They appeared to have learned from certain of their teachers the fine art of circumlocution, the disregard of basic principles of logic, the preference for complex and convoluted language over plain and simple language.
But for the purposes of my class -- which was to teach students the skill of expository writing according to the basic principles of Strunk and White, George Orwell (in his Politics and the English Language), and others of the school which teaches that the best expository writing is that writing which communicates best -- yes, they were almost universally lousy writing.
But, of course, since you didn't teach at Vassar, if I had gone to a shelf of theses written by your students in search of lousy writing it is entirely possible that I would have come away empty handed. |
