Monday 27 March 2017

College Students - They can't spell!

College Students — They can’t spell, write or master math


University students: They can’t write, spell or present an argument

Hilary Wilce reports

University students can’t write decent English. Worse, their attempts to do so show that many can’t follow a logical train of thought or present a reasoned argument. In fact, growing numbers are not ready for the demands of higher education.

 This damning verdict comes from professional writers who have been working with students in universities. They are shocked at what they have found, and have decided to make public a report summarising the full depths of their concerns.
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“Most contemporary British students arriving at university lack the basic ability to express themselves in writing,” says the prize-winning biographer Hilary Spurling, launching the report, Writing Matters.
The poet and playwright Michelene Wandor says: “They don’t know what a sentence is, what a verb is, what a noun is. They struggle with apostrophes and they often don’t know what tense they’re writing in.”
The children’s author Yvonne Coppard agrees. “Their syntax and grammar are sloppy, they have sentences that draggle all over the place, you can see whole pages without paragraphs, and as for speech punctuation – I don’t know what’s happened to that!”
Seven years ago, the Royal Literary Fund launched a fellowship scheme to place writers in universities to help students with their writing. The idea was that working writers would be able to help students in all subject areas communicate better. Since then, 130 writers have worked in 70 universities and colleges, and there are now 60 fellows in post. They work in a range of institutions, from the top-of-the-range to the more humble, and the scheme has been very successful. All have run into the same experience of today’s students’ lack of skills. And now they want the world to know just how bad it is.
Nicholas Murray, a biographer, novelist and poet working at Queen Mary, University of London, says: “I have first-year English undergraduates arriving with essays so incoherent I’m not sure they would have stood up at O-level. After 13 years of education these students are just desperately unable to express what they want to say.”
They don’t seem to be reading either, he says. “You would think that English students would have a passion for language and literature, but it’s not like that. They are excessively dependent on the internet. They think it is the source of all knowledge. One girl quoted Plato in her essay and the source she cited was http://www.brainyquotes.com. Yet these are clever, energetic and imaginative students. Somewhere they’ve been badly let down.”