Clear & Effective?

Clear & Effective

When the New York City board of education set up a special committee to investigate the teaching of reading and English composition in the high schools, it was ready for some bad news--but not for quite such bad news as it got. In 1938, the committee reported last week, only 26% of the pupils entering high school were a year or more behind in their ability to read. Since then, the number has jumped to 34%, and 10% of the pupils are as many as four years below par.

As for writing, the pupils are also lagging: out of 800 compositions that the committee looked over, about one in five had five or more spelling mistakes. There were also 225 errors in tense, 103 "misplaced modifiers," 309 cases of awkward structure, 729 errors involving personal pronouns, and 1,000 mistakes in "word usage and idiom."

All this depressed the committee, but many New Yorkers who read the report found themselves depressed for another reason. If the committee's stuffy officialese is an example of "clear, acceptable and effective" English, then New York's pupils might just as well give up. Sample from page 1 of the report:

"In a bulletin addressed to the principals and chairmen of departments of English and of speech, it was stated that the Survey would seek to ascertain the contribution which instruction in English and speech, through its emphasis on the four areas of communication, makes to the attainment of the objectives of secondary education. The basic assumption on which the Survey was planned was, therefore, that instruction in English is instruction in communication--in a two-way process between someone who speaks or writes (or has written) and someone (or a group) who listens or reads and who in turn may speak or write. Correlatively, it was assumed . . ." etc., etc.

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