“A New Language Crisis?” For Writers 1.2 (Summer 2005). Newsletter.

I write and teach writing, and when most people discover my profession, they often share their belief that we are witnessing a national decline in writing skills.

But these people do not share the same understanding of the perceived decline’s causes. Some cite the lack of grammar instruction as the sufficient condition: at many colleges, even an English major can graduate without taking a class that covers grammar in any substantive depth. If such students are presented with a subtle error or asked to diagram a sentence, many will flounder. This reality troubles my friends.

Others name television and computer games as the culprits. Most people know that reading and writing are linked skills that improve with exercise. Given the number of hours that many people spend watching television or playing The Sims, my neighbors conclude that writing suffers.

Others link the perceived decline to a cultural critique. Governor Blagojevich signed a bill that forbids doctors to conduct tongue-splitting procedures. What passes for casual dress among many people looks awfully close to undress. And like many peers, I have seen more of Christina Aguilera’s body than I have heard of her music. Who can blame my neighbors if they conclude that young people are decadent and depraved?

Yet scholars read studies that compare the work of contemporary college students to that of students from the early decades of the twentieth century. (See Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford’s “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research,” College Composition and Communication 39.4 (1988).) Connors and Lunsford found that while the length of papers has doubled, the number of formal errors per one hundred words has not changed significantly, although the types of errors have changed. Many scholars see such studies as proof that the crisis narratives about student writing are disconnected from reality and connected to ideology.

I am glad that my neighbors see writing and language as serious issues. I agree that you cannot ignore grammar if you profess to be teaching writing—a grammar is only a set of shared rules that minimizes confusion and saves time. Jean-François Champollion worked for twenty-three years to crack the grammar and vocabulary of the Egyptian hieroglyphics; imagine if we had to decipher a Rosetta stone for every time we wanted to communicate.

What to do then? Let us suppose that writing skills have not declined to any measurable extent. But because of the ubiquity of the Internet and the consolidation of most media outlets into huge corporations, we are exposed to a vast flood of good and bad writing in many forms (opinion letters, E-mail messages, television scripts). There is an enormous amount of good and bad writing nowadays. And those who recognize good writing notice bad writing and react to it just as negatively as most math professors would react to a student who wrote that 2+2=5. Believers in the crisis narratives might simply be trapped in a false perception.

But they are still clinging to a tiny kernel of idealism in the vast cocoon of empty amusements that envelops us. No, we have not yet discovered a perfect system for raising hundreds of millions of people to a high standard of writing. We still might approach such a system someday, however, especially since modern communication technologies—the same technologies that raise writing deficiencies to our attention—allow us to educate more people more quickly than at any previous time. Surely we could improve the level of writing skill and elevate the level of our public discourse if we cared enough to do so.

Those who care about language, about our future leaders, and about our democracy will play a role in the pursuit of this utopia.

My role is to awaken a love of the English language’s history in my students. We will consider what happened to the English language when hordes of Vikings rampaged over the grounds of English manors and monasteries, when the Normans conquered a country whose people could not talk to them, and when Captain Boycott tried to collect taxes for absentee landlords. We will ponder the irony of the treadmill (formerly a device used to punish prison inmates) in today’s fitness frenzy.

I will demonstrate how mastery of the English language can give one person the power to move millions. We will study how Martin Luther King constructed his “Letter from Birmingham Jail” and Winston Churchill constructed his speeches. All writers could do worse than setting these men’s craftsmanship as the standard to meet in our writing.

If we succeed, we might add to the story of the language one day and will strengthen and elevate our society every day.