Her approach to me was rude, her comment sadly untutored. As I was returning students’ essays on their analytic observations of Boston’s criminal courts, calling out their names while they collected their papers and left class for the day, she came up on my blind side with her essay in hand and indignantly asked, “Why did you grade down for grammar? This isn’t an English course!” Naturally, I wondered what language she thought we were working in. After all, she was an American student.
I was reminded of this episode by the recent article in the Free Press on college graduates’ literacy rates (“College grads show low literacy rates,” Jan. 27, p.1). The article focused on the proportion of graduates with insufficient quantitative skills. Unfortunately, the news is at least as troubling with respect to American college graduates’ reading, writing and thinking skills.
Last December the U.S. Department of Education reported research that showed that only a minority of college graduates scored as proficient in reading literacy, and that this minority had shrunk substantially between 1992 and 2003. In the latter year, only 31 percent of graduates scored as proficient in “prose literacy,” defined as the ability to comprehend texts like newspaper articles and product brochures, and 25 percent scored as proficient in “document literacy,” the ability to use such documents as maps and prescription labels effectively. To say the least, these are not particularly high standards.
The word from the world of professional work is no more encouraging. Many American corporations are spending large sums of money to improve the writing abilities of their college-educated employees. A 2004 survey of chief executives of the nation’s leading companies found that fully one-third of them reported that one-third or fewer of their employees wrote clearly and concisely. Naturally, corporations would prefer to hire only literate graduates than to spend money getting others up to basic levels of communicative ability. This is suggested in the title of the 2004 survey report by the National Commission on Writing: “Writing: A Ticket to Work . . . or a Ticket Out.”
The implications of these findings are clear. For the sake of the country’s economic and civic health, colleges need to require high standards of literacy achievement from students and provide the opportunities for reaching them. And for the sake of their futures in our increasingly complex and globalizing world, students need to pursue these opportunities assertively.
In recent years Boston University has made important progress in this area. The expansion of the College of Arts and Sciences writing requirement is a key example. But colleges’ general requirements can only set basic levels of competency, not the levels that ensure success in the competitive worlds of professional careers. To become truly proficient and competitive, students must take advantage of existing opportunities for strengthening their skills in critical thinking and writing.
Many students ignore these opportunities, which may partially explain why research finds that college seniors often do not believe they’ve significantly improved their writing abilities in college. What follows, then, are some suggestions for achieving these important abilities.
l Eat your vegetables: Choose courses that challenge your critical-thinking skills and that require you to write analytic essays. It’s not always possible to avoid large lecture classes with multiple-choice testing as the dominant evaluation tool, especially at introductory levels. But whether your major is in engineering, health care, accounting, physics or history, wherever possible choose courses and professors known to challenge your intellect and to hold high standards for your oral and written work.
l Think outside the (complaint) box: Make use of your professors’ office hours to review your ideas on course topics and assignments. As a percentage of available time, office hours are a vastly underutilized resource — and one that you are paying for — other than at exam time or when students come after the fact to complain of poor or “unfair” grades. Advance your education by visiting to ask professors to critique your ideas, review your outlines for papers and request readings of full or partial drafts of your papers. (And don’t wait until the last minute to seek such assistance, as those are our busiest office hours. Plan ahead.) This move will not only improve your work. It will also lay the groundwork for stronger letters of recommendation from instructors impressed by your diligence.
l Play the field: Also make liberal use of the other university resources available for skill-building. An excellent choice is the Educational Resource Center at the George Sherman Union, where you can solicit help at the Writing Center. Assistance ranges from one-on-one meetings with writing tutors to on-line help to workshops on writing and other skills. Use this resource even if you believe you are a strong writer. The better you become, the less visible to you are your remaining flaws. A trained outsider can help you spot them.
l Make some noise: If you believe the program(s) in which you are studying could improve the opportunities for developing analytical thinking and writing skills, bring thoughtful suggestions to the faculty. Ideas for new courses, course organization, specific requirements, colloquia and tutoring opportunities don’t always bear fruit — and not all of them should — but some do. Student organizations provide useful mechanisms for discussing and presenting such ideas, and department chairs and directors of undergraduate studies are good resources for student input.
My former student was wrong: my sociology class was an “English” course. Good language use and strong reasoning go hand in hand. Don’t make her mistake. Give your own education a hand up.