Bonehead English

Almost half the freshmen at the University of California at Berkeley flunked an English composition exam this fall. They have had to enroll in a remedial course known around the campus as "Bonehead English." At the University of Miami, the English department has set up an elaborate tutoring center where video tapes are used to help entering students learn grammar, punctuation and organization. At the University of Houston, 60% of the freshmen fail the first three essays they write. Says Jesse Hartley, Houston's director of freshman English: "Students can't carry through an idea in writing; they have no idea what a paragraph is; they are unable to string details together in a logical sequence. They're just sort of vapid."

College English instructors have made similar complaints in the past, but the percentage of incompetent writers among entering freshmen has risen in recent years. Maxine Hairston, director of freshman English at the University of Texas at Austin, blames the shortcomings on the fact that high school students do not read as much as their predecessors. "They were reared on television," she says. "They simply were not forced to use the language very much." Says Robert Hosman, chairman of the University of Miami's English department: "The fundamentals are not being taught properly in secondary schools. The SAT [Scholastic Aptitude Test] and College Board scores across the country have shown a considerable lowering of verbal ability." In fact, the College Board has devised a written English test to help colleges place freshmen in the appropriate class. Some 425,000 high school students took the new 50-question test--along with their entrance exams--for the first time last week.

At Berkeley, says Instructor Kimberly Davis, the average student in the Bonehead English course "attended a good high school, probably received B's if not A's in English, and is either distressed, appalled or outraged to discover that he can't write up to university standards." Six Berkeley students recently put their anger in writing. After some editing help from their instructor they mailed a letter to their high school English department protesting their poor preparation. They never got an answer.

Orderly Fashion. The decline in writing ability shows up even at Harvard, where all undergraduates must take a twelve-week course in expository writing. "We try to teach them to write a simple, clear sentence that says what they mean and then arrange those sentences in some orderly fashion," says English Professor Gwynne Evans. "Most of them don't know how to do that when they come here." The discipline was too much for one Harvard student. "It nearly drove me crazy," he says. "I tried to write what I was really feeling and I got all these irrelevant comments about grammar all over the pages'. I ran through the streets of Cambridge weeping."

Some educators seem inclined to ease the anguish of the students. Last spring the Conference on College Composition and Communications* voted "to uphold the right of students to their own language." The resolution outraged some professors, including John Gabel, head of the English department at Ohio State University. "It is broad enough to wipe out even the need to learn how to spell," he says. "That's misplaced humanism, not education."

"The conference represents 3,000 college English instructors.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.