Students need tools of language trade

It’s obvious: Students need to strengthen their knowledge of the elementary principals of composition. Or is that principles?

Some students – in higher education, to boot – don’t know the difference.

“If E. B. White were alive today,” a colleague joked the other day, “he’d turn over in his grave.”

That slip of the tongue is mild for what some teachers experience from students who are not at all perturbed that they cannot spell, write, or articulate their ideas even though they chose a field of study called communication.

Just the other day, a student wrote a lengthy excuse for her poor grade on a paper. “I did not understand the proffessor’s question,” offered the writer; “That is why I did not do well in this speach.”

That was not the only reason, to be sure. The fact the course name – speech – was misspelled six times should have served as a clue the student and the syllabus were ill-matched.

It’s easier to forgive the skid-talker, who accidentally fuses two thoughts together and comes out with this opening to a debate: “For your information, let me ask you a question.” Or when enthusiastically promoting a movie by exclaiming, “It’s a great picture. Don’t miss it if you can.” We all just laugh when a friend says, “From time immoral.”

But in a computer age when spell-check and thesaurus are included in every word-processing program, there is only one excuse for misspelled words: laziness. Case in point, a journalism student who explained on a recent examination the difference in feature stories and “braking news.”

Two other students wrote “it’s” as a possessive rather than a conjunction. The same ones cited the “principle reasons,” arguing the principal was their “pal” at school – only that. They correctly used “affect” and “effect” but were uncertain in doing so.

The certain thing is that statistics on both reading and writing grow more appalling each year. The United States, said poet Karl Shapiro, “is in the midst of a literary breakdown.” Historian Jacques Barzun agreed: “We have ceased to think with words.”

And my all-time favorite, E.B. White, put it this way: “Short of throwing away all the television sets, I really don’t know what we can do about writing.”

Those of us trying to teach the communication skills of writing and speaking are mightily concerned. Each time we inch forward, we take two steps backward. Each time we discover a student whose foundation in grammar and composition is sound, we bump into another who is unable to write or speak well.

Students do not know the proper case of pronouns or how to punctuate sentences. They don’t understand active voice; they don’t stick to one tense. These are college students we’re talking about, those who have been shortchanged by earlier teachers.

It’s obvious a carpenter cannot build without learning to use hammers, saws and screwdrivers. Similarly, these young adults who hope to work in the “mass media” should learn, even at this late date, to use their tools – the principal one being the English language.