K-16: Land of Lies

No one can write, from college all the way to the very beginning.  It's not an accident.

Bruce Deitrick Price

Many college kids can hardly write a proper English sentence, never mind a proper essay.  Meanwhile, the essay-writing industry is huge, churning out tens of thousands of illegal documents. Naturally, all participants in the scam pretend there's no scam, and so the scam can go on...........

Even though half the incoming students are completely incompetent at the sentence level, colleges pretend it's not so. In that explains why so many young Americans can't write well, Natalie Wexler states, "Colleges simply assume students already know how to write sentences." Course syllabi and textbooks all peddle the fiction that students can produce grammatical sentences at will, without crude errors like fragments, run-ons, or subject-verb disagreements. That's grotesquely untrue............The starting point for all of these developments is the poor instruction of reading in the early grades.  Millions of children reach middle school with only limited literacy.  Naturally, their writing skills are even lower than that.  Children need to be good fluent readers, then they acquire a good vocabulary, then they can move to writing an essay.  If reading isn't taught properly, writing will be an impossible dream..........More