the words decay and fall

[freckles_and_doubt]

Interesting article in the M&G this week, nicked from The Guardian: last week Susan Greenfield gave an address to the House of Lords, questioning the effect of media society on learning patterns and brain activity. (She's a neurobiologist). The paragraph that really caught my attention:

[Greenfield] begins by analysing the process of traditional book-reading, which involves following an author through a series of interconnected steps in a logical fashion. We read other narratives and compare them, and so "build up a conceptual framework that enables us to evaluate further journeys... One might argue that this is the basis of education ... It is the building up of a personalised conceptual framework, where we can relate incoming information to what we know already. We can place an isolated fact in a context that gives it significance." Traditional education, she says, enables us to "turn information into knowledge."

This hits home, because I've spent a lot of the weekend marking second-year essays, and have had my nose forcibly re-rubbed in the perennial and increasing problem that undergrads have no idea how to structure an argument, to relate concepts logically. They don't read, and therefore text, particularly in large, literate quantities, is monstrously alienating to them. Increasingly, year after year, their essays are cobbled-together Frankenstein's monsters of quotes, details and plot descriptions, lurching around in circles with no underlying coherence at all.

We all know how this ends. Torches and pitchforks, and those of us who represent the last bastion of literacy (and a slew of really low essay marks) looking on apprehensively as the mob swarms up the hill.

Comments

Sentenced to hard time

[(Anonymous)]

My job -- and there are not many like me left -- is to intervene in a comprehensive way in the appalling, sloppy and fractured copy written by professional journalists who have supposedly been trained. But for one or two rare exceptions (both coming from the Rhodes journalism course), they cannot connect information in a logical sequence or write a sentence more complex than the simple declarative. A ghastly method has been evolved to expand these by creating unreadable trains of adjectives from words that never had a clue they were at all adjectival. They call this "active" writing. But it is a quagmire. How are they going to compile a coherent narrative from this jumble? Let's just forget about good writing, that doesn't come into it. And what happens when rewrite/splash subs like me die out?

DavetheF