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Thursday, May 18, 2006
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How Many Semi-Literates? If you’re after an intelligent effort to refute ACTA’s “How Many Ward Churchills?” report, go here and here. If you want UD’s admittedly rather narrow take on it, proceed. I think ACTA seriously overplays its hand, and makes a rhetorical error in invoking ol’ Ward as some sort of paradigm, in this report. But -- the report certainly kicks up a lot of academic crap. For instance, there are professors whose level of writing is so low that they should not be teaching a course with a writing component. Here’s an example -- a course description ACTA found: This course examines some critical American social problems. These include problems in the economy and political system, social class and income inequality, racial/ethnic inequality, gender inequality and heterosexism, and problems of illness and health care. Emphasis will be on how these problems are natural outgrowths of our existing social structure. This paragraph captures the sort of student writing I spend my life trying to correct. Redundancy, vagueness, jargon, cliché, death on wheels. Yet it is written by a professor. A professor who will be reading and evaluating student writing. A student who writes well and takes this course will be made to suffer for her superior literacy. She has entered a room with a professor dedicated to the destruction of her writing. Here’s a sentence taken from another course description: This survey course will explore the ways American writers utilize literary and cinematic texts as tools to theorize and debate notions of race in the late 19th and 20th Centuries. The course’s title is Writers Who Utilize Their Tools. No. Not really. The other doodoo ACTA sniffs out is the I’m So Excited I Just Can’t Hide It syllabus, which announces to the world a course which will change you forever! If you’ve got the guts! If you’ve got the honesty! The fearful need not apply! [UD's comments are in parenthesis.] Sex and Sensibility in the Eighteenth Century |