The abyssmal Unfortunate current state Of, Writing

Quick, tell me what’s wrong with this sentence:

While in the Dominican Republic, the characters in the story do not fall under the shadow of racial prejudice, however, in the United States, it is clearly shown that Dominicans live, as Fanon states in the above quote, “…in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race.”

Did you get it all? The redundancy (“characters in the story”), the cliché (“fall under the shadow”), the missing semi-colon (“racial prejudice, however,”), the passive voice (“It is clearly shown”), the inelegant attribution (“states in the above quote), the unnecessary ellipses (“…”)? This was the second sentence in the first textual analysis of freshman composition class I just finished TA-ing. Its author, a bright, high-achieving Georgetown freshman, received the highest grade on this assignment.

I’ve spent a bit of time over the past couple of years thinking about writing. I’ll be finishing up an MA in English in just a few weeks, and the profession for which my degree and experience most qualifies me (besides the fast food industry—yes, I’ve heard all of the English major jokes) is teaching writing. This is daunting for several reasons: the $15,000 no-benefits annual salary that hungry MA adjuncts eke out by teaching a class here, a class there, in any university that will deign to hire them; the mercilessly self-perpetuating stacks of double-spaced, 1”-margin, 5-page textual analyses I will have to assign, read, comment on, often despair of, and grade for the rest of my life; the interminable, exhausting student conferences that will all begin and end—every one of them—with, “So if I do everything you tell me, I’ll get an A, right?” That’s the most daunting reason of all—the secret suspicion that no matter what I teach them, no matter what I tell them, and no matter how assiduously they try to change their writing to suit me, they simply will not leave my class better writers.

Is there a crisis in the current state of writing? Are universities granting diplomas to an increasingly inarticulate bunch of BA’s and BS’s? That’s what they think writing is, after all—a bunch of BS that English teachers make them do, but if they can put all of the commas in the right places, they deserve an A. And sometimes, I have to admit, I’ll be so relieved at reading a grammatically clean paper, that I’ll be tempted to overlook the inflated, saccharine content and give them that A anyway.

Now maybe I’ve bored and nauseated the majority of my readers. But this is actually a big deal in rhetoric and composition circles—what is good writing anyway? Is it simply demonstrating competence in syntax, conjugation, declension, and standard American English? Is it sound critical thinking, no matter how choppy the prose? Is it style, voice, confidence? And what, therefore, should a writing class teach? How to parse a sentence or how to have an opinion? Or how to vary your sentence construction so that you’re not always ending with question marks?

As with practically everything else in my life, my choice in education and profession is fraught with insecurity. Do I really know what good writing is, and can I teach it? I’m confident I can create a positive learning environment and help students through some papers, but I’m not so sure I can really give them the writing skills they’ll need in all of their other classes and jobs for the rest of their lives. If there is something fundamentally wrong with the teaching of writing in the American educational system, I don’t have enough hubris to think that I personally can fix it.

But—yes, this is the implacable turn toward optimism that characterizes every one of my posts—I still love teaching writing. And I still believe in it. One of my grad student colleagues is writing a thesis positing that since 90% of undergraduates will be doing more business writing than humanities writing, 90% of freshman comp classes should be taught through business schools (actually, the ideas are much more sophisticated than that, but you get the idea). But while a cumbersome, obsolete educational system keeps feeding me wide-eyed freshmen to teach, I’ll do it and like it. I actually tricked you at the very beginning of my post. Despite some wrong things, I also think there are many right things about that sentence. Here it is again:

While in the Dominican Republic, the characters in the story do not fall under the shadow of racial prejudice, however, in the United States, it is clearly shown that Dominicans live, as Fanon states in the above quote, “…in a society that proclaims the superiority of one race.”

Did you notice the parallel construction? The value-added quote? The hint of analysis yet to come? This girl is doing more than just vapid summary—she is thinking theoretically about a difficult piece of contemporary fiction. Not bad for a girl just out of high school. My concerns remain: I don’t know if I know how to do well what I’ve spent several thousand dollars training myself to do. But that’s the good thing about blogs—now you can tell me what makes good writing, how you learned to write well, and what novice MA’s in English should do to help.

P.S. Many thanks to M* for hosting me this summer. Speaking of writing, I have a thesis to finish, so I’m ducking out of the bloggernacle to go compose some inflated, saccharine content.