Faculty Who Diss Student Writing Under the "Kids Today" Trope Forget They Were Students

An answer that Steven Pinker made in a Q and A with Gareth Cook in Nature about Pinker's latest book, The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, touches on a view of students many college teachers carry.

It seems that it is pretty standard, in books about writing style, to bemoan the decline of the written word. Yet you don’t. Why? 

Every generation thinks that “the kids today” are ruining the language. They confuse changes in themselves (people pay more attention to language as they get older and consume more text) with changes in the times. Studies of writing quality in student papers have shown that there has been no deterioration over the decades, and no, today’s college students don’t substitute smiley-faces and texting abbreviations for words and phrases.

Pinker's made this point in other places: there was no magical time when students arrived at college as literate and able as faculty imagined students used to be when the faculty were students themselves. If this understanding informs Pinker's style guide, that's wonderful; I look forward to reading it.

As Andrea and Karen Lunsford note, mistakes have always been a fact of life and the number of mistakes students make has held constant for a hundred years. Things are not getting worse. In many ways, since students are writing more in their everyday lives, things are getting better.

But a lot of faculty -- and not just those who do not like teaching, but also faculty dedicated to teaching and learning -- believe students today are not as able as students were when today's faculty were students.

Five facts that contribute to that way of thinking

Fact one: Every faculty member teaching today was once a member of an undergraduate freshmen class.

Fact two: All faculty members teaching today were, when they were new students, taught by faculty inclined to the same broad judgments faculty hold now: students today cannot write, read, nor think as well as students before them.

Fact three: Very likely, most faculty learned academic reading and writing fairly quickly, came to like it because they took to it. There's also a very good chance that most faculty teaching writing now were not required to take a first year writing course.  Because they tested out of the course, they never experienced learning side by side with writers for whom learning academic writing was a struggle.

Fact four: To become faculty, one must like higher education enough to get the required graduate degrees. Faculty career paths centers on he reading, writing, and thinking their disciplines foster. Even those who do not publish, largely read and write for a living.

Fact five:  A lot of non writing faculty who care about helping their students improve their writing attend writing across the curriculum workshops, and take other steps to become more confident teachers of writing. But many, many more, including sadly faculty who regularly teach first year and developmental writing courses, fall back into their frustrations, and instead use fatal error policies, harsh grading, belittling comments and other counter-productive methods that work against student progress. This prevents students from improving as writers by setting them up to take the blame for not withstanding the pedagogical assault of these tactics.

But there is another fact to remember.

The primary fact and truth: All students can learn to write. Writing can be taught, students can come to enjoy writing, and can come to know how to write for a particular academic discipline, following its rules for thinking, researching, and communicating. 

Even the weakest writer placed into the lowest level developmental writing course can write. And because the very weakest writers turn are furthest from the conventions and stylings of academic writing, they turn out sentences and paragraphs that delight in the most wonderfully inventive and joyous ways.

And to be open to that delight, all a teacher has to do is remember that there really was never a time when students today were not as good as the students who came yesterday. How do I know? Because in five, ten, fifteen or twenty years, the students we do have today will be the students from the past who future "students of today" will be compared unfavorably against.

Or put another way, the students you have in this moment are always as good as students get.