Writing Well Revisited

Occasionally I believe that my colleagues at GCC and I are overly concerned about how well our students write and speak.  I am quite certain that most of my students believe that I am obsessed with grammar and style--which my own mentors and former instructors would laugh out loud about every day of the week, twice on Sunday.  If you follow my blog, or listen to some of my conversations regarding the quality of communication, you know that most academics think communication is a pretty important issue.  Academics believe it is important for a number of reasons and we discuss communication in terms of quality and content.  I was not surprised then to see an academic in his blog about how to give a five minute commencement speech made communicating one of his five numbered points to make in the speech.  Here is an excerpt from his comments:

The Lesson?  No matter what you end up doing, honing your ability to communicate clearly is invaluable.  I'm not talking about PowerPoint, Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook or whatever eventually replaces them:  I'm talking about words and prose and poetry and the capacity to express complicated and nuanced ideas in clear, well-organized language.

Here's the bad news: although some of you do this well, most of you still can't despite spending four years in college.  I don't mean to be cruel, but it's true.  I've been teaching for thirty years at some pretty snooty universities, and the quality of the average student's writing at places like Harvard or Stanford or even the University of Chicago is still pretty poor.

He goes on in his blog to say that this problem is fixable.  For my two cents, the author of these words is on target.  I can write about 5-6 pages in an hour.  To make these 5-6 pages clear and cogent will take me an additional two hours.  I write in 5-6 hour sessions, 3-4 hours of which is devoted to proofreading and editing what I have written in the first half of the session.  I have to end this blog now, as I need some time to work over a few pages of writing.  

p.s.  after writing, I checked my blog stats.  Second most viewed post during the past week was my post from over two years ago about academic vs. public writing.