Essay #5: Improving Freshman English Style

Begin by reading:

• “A First Look At Gobbledygook” by John O’Hayre
• “The Poison Fish” by Ken Macrorie

The writing assignment:

Both of these articles complain that typical writing style has become wordy and lifeless. O’Hayre says that common business writing is bloated and impossible to understand. Macrorie says that college students rarely write vividly about truths that matter to them.

For this essay, craft a suggestion to improve the quality of college freshman writing. It should be specific and feasible. You are arguing that something should be done and you are providing a solution.

Writing schedule:

Easter Break disrupted things a bit, and the result is a couple of extra days. This paper is also longer than the previous papers in this course.

1.  Think  Wednesday, April 3 through Saturday, April 6
2.  Gather  Sunday, April 7 through Saturday, April 13
3.  Draft  Sunday, April 14 through Sunday, April 21
4.  Revise  Monday, April 22 through Friday, April 26
5.  Peer Edit  Wednesday, April 24

Discussion:

My students are often very numb to style. I’ll get a paper which opens with an awkward, misspelled paragraph filled with repetition and cliché, then shifts to precise, complex academic language, and the student asks how I knew it was plagiarized.

Inadequate college student writing style often comes in several distinct flavors, especially at the start of the academic year:

• Laid-back letters to a friend, filled with words such as “gonna” and “wanna,” directly addressing the reader, and sometimes including the sort of word which would make your grandmother want to slap you.
• Stiff, wordy productions that imitate the language of those student attempts in the Engfish article, often filled with legal language such as “heretofore” and “the said item.”
• Papers that show off the writer’s ability to use a thesaurus. One of my students wrote about the “plethoric rambunctiousness” of a scientist’s intellect. Another found the word “adamadvert” somewhere, and it became his favorite, though the word was only used in the 1600s, and even then it was seen as overdone and posh.
• Occasionally I’ll get a “firebrand preacher” paper, screaming at me that I must stop smoking, stop having abortions, or whatever.
• Artificial Intelligence papers have a style of their own. They rarely say anything concrete or specific, never have the nerve to actually make a claim, and pile up technical jargon, so they end up sounding like the first memo in the “Gobbledygook” article. Students who submit these might as well begin with a disclaimer in bold red print: ChatGPT wrote this, and I copied and pasted without doing any thinking or even reading it.

Real academic and business style isn’t much like any of these. The style is much more like what Ken Macrorie and John O’Hayre use in the “Engfish” and “Gobbledygook” articles when they are discussing how to write. (It’s also worth pointing out that there are several different academic and business styles. What works in an article for an education journal will not work in a legal brief.)

Your strategy:

You need to answer two questions:

1. Why is student writing like this?
2. What can be done to improve student writing style? This last will probably come in two pieces:
   1. What can teachers and schools do to improve students’ writing style?
   2. What can students do themselves to improve their own style?

This assignment is really an early look at a Proposal Argument (a very common kind of writing in both business and education). These arguments have a very specific structure:

1. An introduction which orients the reader to the issue.
2. A thesis which makes the claim that the following material will improve things by fixing the problem, answering the question, or taking some other action. The thesis is usually found at the end of the introduction.
3. Some background information. How did we get here? What needs to be fixed? Why is this an issue?
4. The main argument, which demonstrates with specific, objective information that the solution will, in fact, work.
5. Often these proposal arguments must deal with objections. Will this idea cost too much? Are our people trained to do this? Will we run afoul of rules and regulations?
6. The paper ends with a conclusion which sums the whole thing up—what the problem was, what the proposed solution is, and why this idea should work. Often the conclusion includes the next specific step to take to put the proposal into effect.

The views and opinions expressed in this page are strictly those of the page author.
The contents of this page have not been reviewed or approved by Ashland University.
Revised 4/14/24 • Page author: Curtis Allen • e-mail: callen@ashland.edu.