Clearly, the students at Tufts write just as badly as my students at Clark Atlanta.

Ouch.

What's worse, however, is what the bad prose is in service of; namely, a whole lot of fluffy speculation based on very little actual data, essentially anecdotal.

Ah, I see: once again il polipo fascista ha cantato la relativa canzone di cygne...

Well, we can at least be impressed that the other commenters did not immediately start attacking you.

If you don't swat them they don't learn. Go you. That inserted "of," in particular, drives me nuts.

One starfish is gently returned to the ocean...

Snark, snark. And well said. Another ripe phrase:

"results decimated popular wisdom as Tester nearly doubled Morrison's total by a margin of 60 percent to 36 percent"

Decimated popular wisdom? Margin of 60 percent to 36 percent? Eek. Someone get this boy a dictionary, please.

Just to pile on:

Webb, though, is in an advantageous position since he has both the grassroots and D.C. Democratic establishment firmly behind him.

If the grassroots are firmly behind him, does that mean Webb is flat on his back?

ugh. is it just me or did everyone else also get a sugar rush from reading that tufts article?

and that picture! so cute! any cuter and i might have sent it over to the folks at cute overload.

This discussion has been very illuminating. Clearly, we Democrats will again lock up the grammar sticklers and other pedants in 2008. Having secured yet another moral victory, we will be well positioned to cleverly mock President McCain. Congratulations.

as to the article
Tester, an insurgent candidate, though a prominent politician in Montana,
shouldn't that be 'dark horse'? i guess we should add 'insurgent' to the list of terms that have been rendered meaningless over the past 3 years.

also: As the election season continues to play out, expect to see more antiestablishment candidates rise to the surface and watch for the diminishing importance of entrenched endorsements.

i guess mr Blickstein has never heard the phrase 'one swallow does not make a summer' (if that is the phrase and not something i have mutated out of the real one).

the naivete, it burns!

and Gerard, it will be the only thing the pedants can do, seeing as the republicans already know how many votes they are going to get. that's an advantage of having friends that make voting machines that are used in your elections. you's got to break a few law-eggs to make an "absolute power"-omelette after all.

I chuckles. Read much more, and I guffaws.

Wow. I think there's still blood dripping down the inside of my monitor.

Bravo!

"This discussion has been very illuminating. Clearly, we Democrats will again lock up the grammar sticklers and other pedants in 2008. Having secured yet another moral victory, we will be well positioned to cleverly mock President McCain. Congratulations."

Fair enough.

But, naive me, I continue to think we'll do better if we write better and talk better. Sue me.

It's a funny thing, but when we write clearly, use facts, and don't obfuscate, we're more likely to have people nod their heads and say, "That makes sense."

Meaningless fluff does nothing to persuade anyone.

(Of course, this had little to do with being a "grammar stickler." Lots of good writing is ungrammatical. Very little of my critique had anything to do with grammar. Interesting way of belittling substantive criticism, though.)

I'm not in a position to critique anyone's spelling, but sloppy syntax is a by product of sloppy thought. When I read my own prose, I cringe at how much of it is drivel, and best cut to the betterment of the rest.

The only way I know to teach prose revision to someone else is the method employed by Patrick, that is, to actually engage in public acts of revision.

As I just posted in Tapped:

"Wow, I feel like both Strunk and White just attacked me in some dark alleway with a lead pipe and wrench! I agree with all the claims of hackneyed prose and illiterate english. I strive to be someone who has a strong grasp on grammer, syntax, and diction, and within this post I have apparently failed to live up to this expectation. Perhaps in my haste I neglected to both self edit and self critique my writing, and in the future will take greater care when posting. Thanks for the insight!"

My goodness. What a facile, shallow brush-off that was. I suspect, from the speed and smoothness of its deployment, that this wasn't the first time Blickstein's used it.

Tell me again why Tapped is using this pup?

Wlcm t th wrld f crmdgns! Y knw yr t f ds whn y strt cmplnng bt hw thrs xprss thr ds.

[sc n th "yr," bcs knw t hrts y t rd t!]

Political discourse, and indeed all argumentative discourse, is by its nature verbal stuff. The act of forming an argument can't be pried loose from the words used to make that argument. Thus, if you cannot express your ideas clearly and succinctly, there is no reason to suppose the ideas themselves are clear or succinct. So if you think the ideas matter, then how they are expressed necessarily matters, too.

Alex, welcome to Patrick and Teresa's place, Making Light. Pull up a couch, have a beer or a cuppa -- mind the neighbors' homebrew vodka, it's liable to make TNH break out in Early English (both spelled and parsed correctly the more she's had, it is to be in awe).

Take it lightly, gently, and take it deeply to heart; Lisa says it the best, and she, among most of the rest of the crowd here, is a pro: this kind of critique is the best way to teach this stuff; if you didn't get it at Tufts (or junior high like we did), take it up with all the grace you can grab, and learn it now, out here in the Real World™, because it matters.

You may be delighted to learn that Strunk's Elements of Style is available right to hand on the web from good ol' Bartleby, here:
http://www.bartleby.com/141/

It doesn't hurt us to read your errors and slop nearly as much as it hurts you and the messages you ultimately do care to get across to the world.

I realize I can be nitpicky about language, and that it's not a sin to misuse their/there/they're or leave out a comma. However, as Ulrika and RuTemple pointed out, you can't communicate if no one can understand what you're saying.

I couldn't recite more than a couple of vague bits of information from the Prospect post without looking. I can't convince my brain that it's worth sifting out the cliches, and translating the pretentious terms, in order to understand it. So as communication, it fails for me.

I completely agree with Cynthia Wood on the "meaningless fluff" point. And it seems to me that the author of the Prospect post could benefit from reading Roger MacBride Allen's article, "The Standard Deviations of Writing", particularly the bit about "writing to impress rather than communicate". We're all guilty of having done that at one time or another, but we also (hopefully) learn to stop doing it at some point.

"sloppy syntax is a by-product of sloppy thought".  Of course it is.  But what these feckless Tufts are doing is politics, not intelligent ideas.  They couldn't care less if their thought or their syntax is sloppy, so long as their side wins.  In fact, sloppy syntax may be an advantage:  GWB is living proof that inability to put together a coherent sentence is no handicap in politics.

I found the bit about decimating popular opinion to be acutely painful, too.

However, I'm not sure that Blickstein wrote a facile, shallow brushoff. It might have been, but I can't tell for sure--the test is whether his prose improves in the future.

Some people write over-long sentences.

I know I do. Go and look at some of my comments about LJ Abuse.

Do we miss that weakness? Do we dig into the mixed metaphors, and forget that the objective is clarity.

It doesn't matter which party you intend to vote for. Soundbite English is only an extreme. It is the need for clarity taken to uselessness. Don't swing back to the other extreme.

Passing on a link, from a comment Teresa made on the offending article:

George Orwell on good writing

The footnote on flower-names prompts thoughts of Gumby Flower-Arranging.

But Orwell's artcle is sixty years old.  Has laguage truly been declining continuously for all those years, or is it just that the old always decry the casualness of the young?  In forty years' time, will Blickstein in his turn be deploring the loose syntax of the youth?

Has laguage truly been declining continuously for all those years, or is it just that the old always decry the casualness of the young?

Well... yes. But do any of Orwell's examples look like good writing to you? And do any of them (apart from the Communist pamphlet) look particularly dated? He may be wrong about the decline of langauge, but the bad habits he criticises really exist and really are worth avoiding.

Has the luggage truly been reclining continuously for all those years, or is it just that the old always mold the casseroles of the young (to coin a pepper)?

Well, pack it in and see how far it gets you I shouted.

Feelings were hurt, insurgent on a dark horse the young scampion of today has made his grassroots and must now bed down thereof.

more anon.

Blickstein is himself dismissive of some anti-war protesters, whom he sees as being more interested in grabbing headlines, but he agrees with their critique of Bush. “You see the same kind of rhetoric, the same massaging of information going on there as went on during the Vietnam War,” he says. “As young people, as Americans, we are obligated to look at the situation and make a decision for ourselves if what is going on there is right.”

Aiiiiiifuckingeeeeee.

and where do you see that rhetoric and massaging? You see it in the newspapers and on the teevee and you hear it on the radio. As a matter of fact, it was all you saw in the papers and on the teevee and all you heard on the radio.

You know where else you saw it? At the American Prospect. And the Washington Monthly. And eventheliberal New Republic. And after steadfastly ignoring the plain facts for years in some kind of bizarre mass delusion that the yearbook committee are practically junior members of the football team, with a few honorable exceptions (Yglesias springs to mind) they've swept the whole thing away with large-minded whining about their completely understandable visceral loathing of hippies and how it weighed in the balance against, you know, the destabilization of the middle east and the gutting of our economy and tens of thousands of people dying for no fucking reason.

Because, you know, there are plenty of people in the walk of life from which the pool of cannon fodder is drawn who just don't have great big throbbing postadolescent brains that have to be kept safe and fed lattes to gather strength for the Great Public Intellectual Battle to Shape the Future. Adult, mature thinkers know it's all a big fucking game of Stratego and arrange for competitive starting salaries.

Funny that the reign of our callow philosopher kings has gifted us with George W. Bush. Or, you know, not.

Sam:  Yes, I agree.  Orwell's six rules, at the end of his article, are particularly valuable.  What struck me was his lament over the decline of the English language, when we are still lamenting it sixty years later.

I prefer to believe that Orwell has scared several generations of writers into behaving themselves better than they otherwise might have. We invoke Orwell to keep the scare up.

Dave Bell, it was Patrick who quoted him.

Nancy, trust me on this one: Blickstein was reciting a formula.

It's hard to write Orwell, but we should strive to
write Orbetter :-)

Sorry about the misattribution.

I'm not sure, reading the interview article, that the blogger wants to be any sort of writer. Or even what he wants to be. The two deserve some credit for remaining civil about their political differences but...

I know, I'm an outsider. The Democrats can look pretty unpleasantly right-wing from my viewpoint. But there us something that feels wrong about the apparent failure to address the moral and intellectual failings of the current Republican movement.

These are the sort of people who, in a decade or so, might be running your local party apparatus. Do you get any sense that they really care about anything, other than the process of debate. Where's the passion?

Why does that continuing friendship and respect sound to be way too easy?

Sorry about the misattribution. I checked back, and is was Alison Scott who gave the link, which appeared immediately after Teresa's name. That blog format doesn't have a good divider between comments.

I'm not sure, reading the interview article, that the blogger wants to be any sort of writer. Or even what he wants to be. The two deserve some credit for remaining civil about their political differences but...

I know, I'm an outsider. The Democrats can look pretty unpleasantly right-wing from my viewpoint. But there us something that feels wrong about the apparent failure to address the moral and intellectual failings of the current Republican movement.

These are the sort of people who, in a decade or so, might be running your local party apparatus. Do you get any sense that they really care about anything, other than the process of debate. Where's the passion?

Why does that continuing friendship and respect sound to be way too easy?

OK, now -- Orwell is fine but Strunk and White, not. I refer you to Geoff Pullum at Language Log, and Steve at Language Hat, both of whom are always right.

The guy's bad writing seemed definitely to be the result of trying to "dress up" ordinary writing. Since his ideas weren't that powerful, I can understand his motive. (His response was badly written in exactly the same way.)

I've been saying for some time that Democrats give too much voice to Ivyish types (Tufts is a minor-league AAA Ivy.) I'm also told that undergrad ed in the Ivies isn't necessarily very intensive, once you get in. College is really for networking and learning to behave properly in social situations, you know.

Orwell mostly wrote about deliberately bad bureaucratic-ideological writing which was designed to obscure and confuse the issue. As far as I know he wasn't talking about a temporal decline, but just was outlining the ideal types of badness.

My son went to Tufts, and it was a disappointing experience. It's not Tufts per se, but that whole privileged way of life, which he wasn't confortable with. It was all upper middle class and above -- as he said, Tufts wasn't all white, but it might as well have been.

The late Richard Mitchell found inspiration for his personal crusade in a passage by Ben Jonson, which moved him to include it (setting his type by hand) in nearly every issue of The Underground Grammarian:

Neither can his Mind be thought to be in Tune, whose words do jarre; nor his reason in frame, whose sentence is preposterous...

Has the average quality of published writing declined in the sixty years since Orwell? Of course it has - the environment is different. Publishing is now so cheap that anyone can press a button and have their rough drafts published to the world, spelling mistakes and all. I can publish a comment on Patrick's own blog without having to convince him that my writing is any good. I don't even have to ask. It didn't work that way in Orwell's day.

But all of that is beside the point. Poorly written prose may get published, but it goes unread. It doesn't sell magazines, and it doesn't win arguments.

There are plenty of good writers alive today. The question is: why aren't they the ones being published in Tapped?

What struck me was [Orwell's] lament over the decline of the English language, when we are still lamenting it sixty years later.

Yes, but note that the examples he gives of bad writing are exactly the same kind of thing that we are struggling with now, and note that they're exactly the same kind of problem Fowler was lamenting 35 years previously. There was no decline, only Orwell's nostalgia for an earlier day, perhaps before he had noticed that all this bad writing was out there. There never was a past where all (or even the majority of) journalism and political speech was made in clear, concise and accurate English, I'm convinced of it. There has always been a benefit in sounding like you have a good argument that's just a little too complicated for the listener/reader to understand, so such people will have always taken that route. That's all there is to it.

I'm also told that undergrad ed in the Ivies isn't necessarily very intensive, once you get in. College is really for networking and learning to behave properly in social situations, you know.

One of the most alarming pieces of the right-wing crusade, to me, is the blatant anti-intellectualism of it all - "Those leftist Ivy League-graduates don't know anything about the real world!"

I suspect that's not what you meant (or maybe it was), but:

a) While you can get a good education at many places, do not doubt for a second that a dedicated student can receive a real, excellent education at Ivy League schools. (And, like anywhere else, it is possible to coast by.)

b) Education is important. Academics are important. Experts who spend their lives studying a single topic should be listened to on that topic, and their opinion given good weight. (This is not to say that academics aren't the only important thing; I can think of any number of non-college graduates who make profound contributions to society. But it's one important leg of civilization.)

Please don't buy into the right-wing attack on education by smearing what are, I think it's fair to say, the best repositories of learning and research in the United States.

It's a tribute to the generally high quality of Making Light posters that the inevitable "good writing isn't as important as ..." post was the tenth rather than the third or fourth.

I'm also told that undergrad ed in the Ivies isn't necessarily very intensive, once you get in. College is really for networking and learning to behave properly in social situations, you know.

That depends entirely on the student. It is certainly possible to coast through the Ivies, as it has always been. (George W. Bush: Yale alumnus)

On the other hand, the engineers at Cornell work like dogs. As do the premeds. (The premeds, as a rule, seem to care about nothing on earth but their GPA, but they certainly do work hard.)

The problem with the Ivies is that, despite their lofty reputation and high tuition, their classes are taught by the same grad students that are teaching the classes in your local state university - the ones who may have never taught a course before in their lives.

I'm tempted to rip Tufts (one of the top thirty universities in the USA, according to whatever dubious formula US News uses) for letting someone like Blickstein graduate, but I think I should really rip them for letting him matriculate. The stuff you ripped him for is stuff he should have mastered in high school.

Richard Mitchell is dead? Shit. The Gift of Fire is one of the two books I still have from high school (after uncounted moves, many of them transcontinental), and the only one that was assigned reading for a class. I still reread it more or less annually.

The problem with the Ivies is that, despite their lofty reputation and high tuition, their classes are taught by the same grad students that are teaching the classes in your local state university - the ones who may have never taught a course before in their lives.

True at some of the Ivies, but not all. I had friends who had (variously) Elaine Pagels, John McPhee, James McPherson, Toni Morrison, Joyce Carol Oates, Kenneth Deffeyes, Val Fitch, and Brian Kernighan not only teaching classes, but running individual sections and grading assignments.

What is it with the Ivy-bashing? They are good schools.

"But, naive me, I continue to think we'll do better if we write better and talk better. Sue me."

But we have to have something to write and talk about. That's the real problem; the public isn't ready for a progressive agenda yet (though a few more years of these aristocrat wannabees and they will be), so clear language is not our friend. And of course the current Republican leadership can scarcely come out say directly that they are interested in setting themselves up as the ruling class of an empire, though it seems pretty plain that they are. So no-one says anything clearly.

Bah. I have a very poor attitude for someone who has written a lot of political commentary.

Just to demonstrate Patrick's point, I clicked the link expecting to see him tear a hole in someone for their poorly formed political thoughts. I read the blog entry and--honestly here--before reading the comments, scratched my head and read it again because I couldn't figure out what Blickstein was trying to say. Not being a political junkie, I didn't even get he was talking about Democrats (um, he is, right?).

I haven't read the Orwell essay, but in response to the "President McCain" jabber: yes, this is important. One of the biggest problems I see on the Democratic side is an inability to communicate an effective message (to say nothing of an affective one). You cannot persuade someone to your line of thought if they don't understand what you're saying. Giving someone who can't write a prominent place to regurgitate muddled cliches does not help the cause.

And, at the risk of getting into a Strunk and White brawl (especially on this blog!), I don't think it is the be-all and end-all. No one does. But until you understand what is wrong with it, or at least can defend what you think is wrong with it, you should use it! Especially if you didn't learn how to parse sentences in grammar school.(And that, my friends, is going to be my favorite pun of the day).

John Stanning, Jules --

Have you read lots of Victorian prose?

Darwin and Kipling are rather distant from each other, but, well, go read it. Present prose standards are much, much lower. Whether the decline was continuous I do not opine.

Strunk and White was aimed squarely at the Freshman comp and sophmore survey class taught by English departments all over the U. S.

It's still aimed there now, though the lastest editions are not, exactly, the work of Strunk or White.

Strunk and White, or Zinsser, or Williams' Style, -- all are books that direct their attention to writing the undergraduate academic essay.

That's it; that's what they're for, that's their real market. Just because your undergraduate English professor uses it to help you get a clue doesn't mean that the book will apply to any other phase of your life as a writer.

There are much much better books on prose revision, on rhetorical analysis, and on style.

Though if you can get your students to, like, you know, read, maybe even follow some of the guidelines in any of these books, (even the stupid guidelines) their writing will improve.

I'm confused by some of these comments. Surely good writing is a non-partisan issue? Why is it a surprise that an editor sometimes cannot resist the urge to, y'know, edit?

I didn't think Patrick's point was that the Demcoratic Party will lose if one journalist at TAPPED writes like crap.

Randolph--I think the public is more than ready for a progressive agenda. And if the progressives, particularly the top Democrats, could articulate one, the public would listen.

The trouble is that the Democratic articulations of position have been timid, tepid, and thin. Someone stands up in Congress and says something that makes progressives cheer; days later he apologizes. Meanwhile the other side is saying things that would have been cause for dueling a century ago, and it's just let pass.

The ability to write with force is important to this struggle. There's more to cogency than good ideas alone. Remember Dogbert's Law? "A bad idea which is well presented will do better than a good idea which is poorly presented." We're living that now in American politics.

Graydon:  Kipling, yes, lots;  Darwin, never (though I'd like to read him, to understand what he really said rather than for his superior prose, assuming you mean Charles);  Dickens, Scott, etc., a little.  I agree with you about Kipling, but I'm not sufficiently well-read to be able to compare authoritatively the quality of Victorian writers with those of today.  Perhaps others here can help?

I note that in his latest response to Patrick's criticism (June 8, 11:15 AM), Mr. Blickstein admits to PUI (posting under the influence). That's really respecting one's audience.

The ass proudly admits that he posted while drunk, but his grammar and spelling are no better now when he's allegedly sober.

I await "it was a sociological experiment" and "the lurkers support me".

Best Orwell quote on writing ever:

"Good prose is like a windowpane."

Over-inflated, preposterous prose such as the blog entry critiqued is designed to keep out meaning and to prevent clarity of thought.

What wretched crap. And, if I may say so, smacks of over-reaching. Pfui!

I feel odd about this. The failings of his prose are the failings of my prose, both grammatically and stylistically.

I consider myself lucky that my corner of my profession disdains metaphor, ignores style, and generally requires mechanically correct but hilariously elongated sentences

He claimed it was the "last comment".

It is the motion before this blog that only Teresa shall be allowed to get away with posting while drunk.

All those in favour?

Since I've never heard of these guys, could someone explain why they're priviledged? Or am I missing an obvious reference again? I do that sometimes...

The stuff you ripped him for is stuff he should have mastered in high school.

The operative word here is "should," but it applies often enough to the schools themselves rather than the students.

High school students, at least in the rather highly ranked public school my kids attend, are not held to rigorous standards of spelling, grammar, and punctuation, much less to Nielsen-Haydenian levels of content, metaphor usage, word choice, and so on.

They write well (the better writers, anyway) in that they can get their point across, sometimes in an elegant way, but they also exhibit many of the same problems we see in Mr. Blickstein's writing.

None of these issues is given the emphasis necessary to turn good but muddy writing into better, clear writing. English teachers seem to see their job as promoting good structure and well-crafted arguments and analysis. Teachers of other subjects requiring writing (e.g., History) see themselves as having even less responsibility for these topics.

Obviously, given the wide variability in US public school curriculums and standards, this is an anecdote rather than data.

Cynthia Wood:

It's a funny thing, but when we write clearly, use facts, and don't obfuscate, we're more likely to have people nod their heads and say, "That makes sense."

Meaningless fluff does nothing to persuade anyone.

One would think so, but how does that explain this administration which has nothing to say, and can't even say that well?

Re: Tufts:

My best friend went there. (I went to a second-string state school on scholarship; my family didn't have the money for private schools to be an option. I'm certainly not privilege-free, being white, straight, and middle-class, but I'm not speaking from a background of trust funds and private schools here.)

Tufts definitely contains many privileged students, but the Tufts students I met through my friend were not privileged brats. It was not a scientific sampling, so I can't necessarily draw any conclusions from that.

However, I'm currently at a campus that is definitely full of spoiled rich kids (you've probably heard the name a lot recently). I'm here as a grad student, again on scholarship, and over the past semester have been extremely frustrated by the undergrad culture soaked in privilege and entitlement. (Also soaked in alcohol, but that goes along with it.)

What I know of the culture at Tufts is very different from the culture here. The Tufts kids I knew were interested in doing something genuine, not just in landing an investment banking job and getting rich. They were strongly involved in peace and justice movements, and held a progressive, international view on things -- and they tended to genuinely be good at what they did.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't consider the Tufts name to be a good marker for someone who's privileged, spoiled, and has an entitlement complex. I'd consider the name of my present university to be a better marker.

(I also felt the need to defend some of the people I care about, and know to be good people, who have graduated from Tufts.)

This, of course, does not absolve Blickstein, and it doesn't change the fact that many people with brand-name diplomas often have doors open for them, when on their own merits they could not have opened those doors. Patrick's point about the feckless pundit class stands, and stands firmly.

The problem with the Ivies is that, despite their lofty reputation and high tuition, their classes are taught by the same grad students that are teaching the classes in your local state university - the ones who may have never taught a course before in their lives.

At which Ivies did you find this to be the case? I didn't have a single class taught by a grad student in four years at my Ivy. I did have interesting classes with Natalie Zemon Davis, John Boswell, David Underdown, and John Hollander, along with more obscure but still excellent junior professors like Maria Menocal and Suzanne Wofford.

I did have discussion sections with grad students, but those were breakout sessions from the main classes.

What's the point of being a member of the ruling class, and of going to school with other members of the ruling class, if it doesn't entitle you to be given jobs for which you aren't qualified, and guarantee that underperformance will never earn you any serious penalties?

DaveL:

The stuff you ripped him for is stuff he should have mastered in high school.
The operative word here is "should," but it applies often enough to the schools themselves rather than the students.

High school students are not held to rigorous standards of spelling, grammar, and punctuation.
They write well (the better writers, anyway) in that they can get their point across, sometimes in an elegant way, but they also exhibit many of the same problems we see in Mr. Blickstein's writing.

None of these issues is given the emphasis necessary to turn good but muddy writing into better, clear writing. English teachers seem to see their job as promoting good structure and well-crafted arguments and analysis. Teachers of other subjects requiring writing (e.g., History) see themselves as having even less responsibility for these topics. Obviously, given the wide variability in US public school curriculums and standards, this is an anecdote rather than data.

Your points are, generally, accurate. Some of this is the same thing that was discussed earlier about the "actual" vs. "perpetual" vs "static (or illusory)" decline in writing quality.

There has never been a time when all students were well educated in writing. Some can't do it, others won't take it. (This is also a part of why some non-language teachers don't edit for grammatical fine points -- they don't always know them themselves.) So to some extent, there has always been a wide pool of ability, and as was mentioned earlier it is the internet's ability to allow self-publishing and self-selecting of bad examples that makes the "poor writing" seem more prevalent.

However, there is also some truth to the "What are they teaching you in school these days" argument. There are also a great number of reasons for these failures:

A decline in the perceived importance of education in general has led to larger classrooms with more students, fewer resources, and less time spent on the individual student.

A similar decline in the perceived importance of good English. Despite numerous studies proving the opposite, including conclusions as banal as better-written descriptions net higher returns on e-bay. There is a counter-culture in place that says that "all that" doesn't matter anymore, or only matters for "important writing" -- presumably meaning business -- and e-mail, blogs, IMs, and personal and informal writing is not required to follow the rules. Or at least, not to the same degree.

Overlap from this philosophy means that since people don't attempt to write good English all the time, it is harder for them to do it "on demand" one-fourth, or -tenth, or -hundredth of the time, for that one "important" document. Therefore, overall skill is lower.

Over-dependence on the computer: If spell check and grammar check approve it than it must be okay. Everyone forgets the lesson of "Jabberwocky": That one can write something grammatically correct that is still semantically null.

A divide in the English teaching community over what can be effectively taught, and how to do it.

A divide between teachers and parents over what the children should be graded on and what is (grrr) "fair".

A mis-perception by readers (and teachers) on when grammar was taught, as opposed to when it was first applied accurately. Time and practice make a huge difference, and people will often judge students by more-mature standards of writing as that is what they usually read. [Of course the corollary to this is that some teachers will occasionally rate students high or low based on a subjective local standard rather than an objective criteria standard. i.e. "This is 5xs better than any other paper in class." Gets an A, though the stright quality evaluation might be/have been a B-.

I find that young people today spend too little time reading and, consequently, have not developed the proper feel for writing. This leads to two things:

(1) Writing that is confused, illogical and devoid of substantive content. Very much, in fact, like the piece that annoyed PNH.

(2) Pompous overwriting resulting from reading too much po-mo, po-co, and po-stru inflated rhetoric masquerading as critique.

What's the point of being a member of the ruling class, and of going to school with other members of the ruling class, if it doesn't entitle you to be given jobs for which you aren't qualified, and guarantee that underperformance will never earn you any serious penalties?

The point of going to a school for the ruling class is to become a member of the ruling class. The fact that such is an option for at least some people who come from families that are not members of the ruling class is one of the strengths of the American system.

Also, going to a school for the ruling class gives you access to the resources made available to the ruling class: taking creative writing classes from John Crowley, say, or physics with Philip Morrison, or computer science with Donald Knuth. Not to mention world-class libraries and well-stocked laboratories and the like.

Again, I honestly don't understand the impulse to denigrate the people who are educated by our finest schools. Some of them go on to lives of remarkable public service. John Kerry was attacked as "just another northeastern Ivy Leaguer." Why the hell should an excellent education be a disqualifier for the Presidency?

Let me make a different, sociological, argument. There's going to be a ruling class, if all of human history is any guide. How would you like that ruling class educated? And would you like that ruling class open to new members through education, or not?

Alex Cohen: June 08, 2006, 12:47 PM:

Minus five points for not recognizing the (probably) rhetorical nature of Teresa's post. (Not that isn't how it works for at least some of the people in government, but the 'old buddies' effect is at least as bad.)

Some members of my family are going to Ivy League schools, not because they want to become members of the ruling class, but because that's where the classes are that they want to take.

MikeB: "There are plenty of good writers alive today. The question is: why aren't they the ones being published in Tapped?"

Well, in Tapped's defense, they do publish some of the better political bloggers. Matthew Yglesias, for instance, is a superb writer. (And I'm not biased in favor of him merely because he's one of the few Iraq-war supporters from 2003 to subsequently submit his mistake to honest and withering scrutiny. He's also a genuinely excellent informal stylist.)

Also, in Tapped's defense, the posts I was snarking about appeared on Midterm Madness, a different blog on the American Prospect's site, not Tapped.

John Emerson: "OK, now--Orwell is fine but Strunk and White, not. I refer you to Geoff Pullum at Language Log, and Steve at Language Hat, both of whom are always right."

Yo, John, I refer you to this Sidelights entry from May 6, 2006. I wasn't the one citing Strunk and White.

Alex, you're taking one aspect of this conversation too much to heart. Of course there are many things to value about our high-end universities. But the fact that even supposedly progressive political magazines are shot through with good-school cronyism isn't one of those things. Such cronyism isn't a stop-the-presses outrage, but it's certainly worth noting and even mocking. That's not anti-intellectualism, it's a sign of social health.

Alex --

If I must have a ruling class (which premise I do not accept), I want them educated under conditions where they die if they fail. For advanced classes, they die if their subordinates fail.

John Stanning --

Yes, I did mean Charles, and not Erasmus. Charles is worth reading for his prose, as well as his ideas. One goes tripping lightly through big, complex sentences rife with nuance and heavy with import, so that it is entirely a joy to behold.

Fair enough.

Partisan blogs should be well-written. If they aren't, they hurt their cause. "Bucking the Establishment" was terribly written.

I'll say this is MacDonall's defense, though: Rudeness does not help a cause. Please, be polite. Note that polite behavior in New York, and in fandom, may seem rude elsewhere.

Urr... "Fair enough" to PNH.

To Graydon: I'm unfamiliar with any actual societies, cultures, or civilizations that lasted more than a single generation that did not have an elite that functioned as a ruling class. I'd welcome counterexamples.

Your system sounds, well, insane, but if you're that big a fan of the Imperial Forces, then you're welcome to them.

they die if they fail

whoa. tough crowd. out of curiosity, who gets to define "fail"? And are they accepting bribes? or is accepting bribes also failing. just wondering.

None of these issues is given the emphasis necessary to turn good but muddy writing into better, clear writing. English teachers seem to see their job as promoting good structure and well-crafted arguments and analysis. Teachers of other subjects requiring writing (e.g., History) see themselves as having even less responsibility for these topics.

I don't understand what you mean here. It's true that high schools don't tend to insist on grammar and spelling; and as a college professor I'm usually required to do whatever I can to correct it (which is tough when I have a class of 25 and am supposed to be spending my time teaching them college-level History, or Latin).

But if English teachers were to focus on promoting well-crafted arguments and analysis, wouldn't that do more to ensure better, clearer writing than hammering away at grammar and spelling? That's the approach I tend to take.

[My impression at college is that English professors focus more on grammar and spelling and self-expression, and historians focus more on argument and analysis, but I may well be biased there.)

Grammar and spelling is a problem for virtually all of my students, but it strikes me as easier to fix than the biggest problem - which is that students will write without knowing what it is they are trying to say. The worse students use clever-sounding language without any grasp of what it means; the better students overreach, which usually results in them using clever-sounding language without knowing what it means. Blickstein would fit in very well.

So my approach is to focus on clarity by making the students think about argument and analysis. Once they begin to recognise an argument and, with luck, become invested in it, I'm able to point out that their argument will be far less effective if they spell badly and use poor grammar. They can sort that out for themselves.

All of which means, I guess, that I think high schools as you describe them have their priorities right. Forgive me if I misunderstood the point you were making.

The point of going to a school for the ruling class is to become a member of the ruling class.

Really? Weirdly enough, I did it to get a good education. I am certainly a miserable failure at becoming a member of the ruling class; happily, that was never my ambition. It's not the only way to get a good education - a dedicated student can pull a good education out of pretty much anywhere, including thin air and a good library - but it does provide easy one-stop shopping for high-quality offerings.

The fact that such is an option for at least some people who come from families that are not members of the ruling class is one of the strengths of the American system.

My parents met at their Ivy. She was from a poor Southern Appalachian family, first in the family to go to college. He was an immigrant from a family which had been wealthy in their original country (Cuba) but arrived here stripped of all their possessions and surviving on welfare. I'm not sure he was even a citizen yet, though he became one sometime in his late teens. They both went on scholarship money. The results of their education included enough financial success to send one of their children to an Ivy (a different one) as well; it's a pretty good "American dream" story. Isn't that how the system at its best is supposed to work?

How it works for people who have the disadvantage of starting out as part of the ruling class (and therefore being inevitably suspected of getting in on family rather than merit; see Bush, G.W.) is a whole different matter.

It's a little irksome to all be lumped together.

Alex, in the current system, if they fail, their subordinates die. That's after they get out of school. Turning that around sounds fair to me!

Oh, and I see I've repeated at length what Fragano said concisely in the meantime. Sorry.

Thanks for this. TAPPED is infuriating -- so much lazy writing and potted analysis. I think the heart of the problem is that they hire young bloggers and provide them a ready-made readership, whereas elsewhere blogs are labors of love that find (or don't) their own readers.

Note that Yglesias, who I agree is superb, is the exception -- he was a well-known blogger already before he came to TAPPED.

While we're taking Alex seriously:

The point of going to a school for the ruling class is to become a member of the ruling class.

Maybe I'm unfamiliar with today's school system, but are there any "schools for the ruling class"?  I mean, there are schools that offer a good education, to which members of the ruling class (assuming there is one) perhaps go, but those schools aren't explicitly or even implicitly "for the ruling class".  They don't bar non-members of the ruling class - you just need enough money if they're private schools - and the products of these schools don't necessarily become rulers, even if they are children of rulers.
Certainly there's an elite, and its members favour their families and friends (just look behind the Bushes), but is it a ruling class, as such?

Alex Cohen, it's not as though I've never been illegally domiciled in an Ivy League dorm, or typeset one of their newspapers ...

I have nothing against Ivy League universities, or the education they give their students. What irks me is a system that's more than generous about hiring them for plum jobs, while being what I'll charitably call "negligent" about hiring from the ranks.

(While we're on the subject, where in heaven's name is the Washington Post getting its new hires? They've been getting some real prizes.)

Here's a story. It isn't necessarily about Ivy League graduates.

Over the last fortnight or so, I've been having one reporter after another turn up on my front porch. Since I'm a low-yield potential information source, the NYPost, NYTimes, and Daily News all sent their junior reporters. These were all so similar -- well-dressed, cute little blondes in their twenties, and I'm talking more than one of them per paper -- that I eventually asked whether they were really reporters, or whether they were all just students taking the same journalism class. They said no, they really were reporters.

The last reporter who showed up was much older, showing wear along the edges, and was brown. Unlike the blondes, the first thing he did was fish out his credentials and hold them out at arm's length. "How long have you been a reporter?" I asked."

"Twenty years."

He was the only one I invited inside. We had an interesting chat. I told him about all the blondes. He shook his head, and said he kept telling his paper that they needed to hire more Spanish-speaking reporters, and definitely needed some who spoke Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.

I was amazed. If you're covering Metro New York news, it's not hard to get the kind of stories that affluent little blondes with no street smarts are good for. (Did I mention that only one or two of them appeared to have read up on the backstory before going out to ring doorbells? Tsk.) I'm sure these girls had nice resumes and nice educational records and nice manners at their interviews, and if what you needed were generic employees, they'd probably do nicely. But if you're running a paper, what you need are highly motivated news junkies with lots of contacts and city smarts; and if that's who you hire, it's guaranteed that many of them will have spotty backgrounds, and some of them will have nonstandard looks and manners.

Here's an even more tangential story. I was once at a big regional high school competition -- the kind where there's a different challenge every year, and it's supposed to teach ingenuity and teamwork. By the rules of the national organization, it's supposed to be open to any student who wants to participate.

Looking across the big indoor basketball court where it was being held, I spotted a large team that was entirely made up of conventionally attractive girls of nearly uniform size, all of whom looked like they'd bought their clothes from the same store. I nudged a friend of mine there who was one of the organizers, and asked whether that team was from a coed public school. My friend said it was. In that case, I said, the organization should check out what was going on at that school. If it's genuinely open to all comers, the results should be a lot more diverse.

Do you follow me, or have I wandered too far afield?

I've been to gatherings of lefty political webloggers. They're all sizes and shapes and colors. What they have in common is a passion for what they do, and a deep knowledge of the subjects they write about. There's no shortage of talent TAP could draw on.

I'm sure Blickstein's an amiable fellow with lots of friends, but he's also a lightweight. His political analysis is about half an inch deep, he evidently doesn't expect to be called on it, and he isn't embarrassed about being publicly called on his thoughtless writing habits. Since he's been given a slot on Midterm Madness, this lack of embarrassment is troubling.

Blickstein's reply to Patrick was a formula. It's what you say when you want to give the impression of being Earnestly Concerned about whatever it is you've screwed up on, in a situation where appearing Earnestly Concerned will stave off any further unpleasant consequences, but you aren't actually bothering to engage with the subject, and you don't expect there'll be repercussions if anyone notices that's what you're doing.

It's not a hanging offense; but if we care about the long-term wellbeing of Blickstein and The American Prospect, it behooves us to further their educations just a bit right now.

Is it me, or do these references to learning grammar in high school seem odd? I learned grammar in 3rd or 4th grade, got it drilled in over the next couple of years and was expected to know it in high school. There I was evaluated on style, content and analysis.

In high school, I was required to take typing as a graded class because, and we were actually told this, I would be writing papers in college and only lazy, disorganized people hire someone else to type them. Okay, it was a boys Catholic school, but still. I learned, didn't I?

Mark, I was being corrected on the subjunctive when I was in kindergarten, but I won't hold that up as normal.

TNH, presumably the person correcting you was someone who posts here occasionally as "Barbara"?

That'd be the one.

I wish she'd post here more often. She's nice and smart and funny.

Think it's genetic?

Susan, thank you. As someone who went to an elite college from a quite modest background (neither of my parents had bachelor degrees), all of this "ruling class" talk makes me irritable.

John, most of the elite schools offer "need blind admissions." So anyone willing to take on a fair amount of student loans (which would be part of their financial aid package) can attend an elite university.

About Strunk and White and its use as a tool for teaching high school students: I am absolutely incensed that my son's high school does not teach composition until sophomore year. My son is a freshman, and his writing is atrocious. Students no longer spend much time learning grammar in middle school (or maybe that's just in California), and he is creative enough that his teachers were willing to overlook a great deal of sloppy writing. I have given him a copy of Strunk and White in an attempt to help him learn basics, but he ignores it. Teenagers.

I can publish a comment on Patrick's own blog without having to convince him that my writing is any good. I don't even have to ask. It didn't work that way in Orwell's day.

Wow, Patrick. Your blog is OLD!

Teresa, I didn't really learn grammar until high school, but then the Florida public schools of the 70s were rather bad (somewhat like the California schools are today, for the same reasons). I still have trouble with it, probably because I learned it late in life, so to speak.

I have nothing against Ivy League universities, or the education they give their students. What irks me is a system that's more than generous about hiring them for plum jobs, while being what I'll charitably call "negligent" about hiring from the ranks.

Yes. My friends from my second-string state school are all still struggling to find work, two and three years on from graduation. Kids graduating from the place where I go to grad school are aggressively recruited. Investment banking companies pick up the liberal arts grads for two-year gigs that pay money I can only dream about. Are those liberal arts grads smarter than my liberal-arts-degree-holding friends from the state school? Doubt it.

Tangentially, I also find there is a standard "look" for students here -- not only in terms of fashion, but also hair color and style, and especially body type. "Conventionally attractive...of uniform size" covers it.

Randolph Fritz said: But we have to have something to write and talk about. That's the real problem; the public isn't ready for a progressive agenda yet (though a few more years of these aristocrat wannabees and they will be) ...

Bwah?

I'm with Xopher on this. The public is ready. And if they weren't, put the agenda out there anyway, so that people can see it and read it and smell it and know that yes, this is what they really want, and no, they aren't alone in wanting it. And if they have ideas on improvements to be made right here, right now, bonus.

It's a matter of education. You can't know what you really want unless you know what your choices really are.

I told him about all the blondes. He shook his head, and said he kept telling his paper that they needed to hire more Spanish-speaking reporters, and definitely needed some who spoke Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, etc.

Let me guess: the blondes have parents who are willing to spot them the difference between a cub reporter's salary and the actual cost of living in NYC, while potential hires who are fluent in Spanish, Chinese, etc. don't have that luxury, and may even have children of their own to support?

the public isn't ready for a progressive agenda yet

Or, the progressive agenda isn't being told in a way that the public can hear it.

I find myself wondering if the secret access key is not the Ivy League University as such, but something that recruits there. Here, I may be showing my ignorance, but I have heard of these strange societies known as "fraternities". Is the key something like saying, "I was admitted to Ped Xing while I was at Bramah."?

Candle asked: But if English teachers were to focus on promoting well-crafted arguments and analysis, wouldn't that do more to ensure better, clearer writing than hammering away at grammar and spelling? That's the approach I tend to take.

What I see from perusing corrected papers my kids bring home is that grammar and spelling errors are sometimes ticked but never count on the grade. The sort of corrections that Patrick made on Blickstein's piece would hardly ever be corrected and would never count much against the grade. In general, quality of writing counts for less in the grade than the perceived quality of the analysis and the argument, and intent is important. If you have a well-thought out idea, your ability to express it in a felicitous way makes the difference between an A- and an A+. A bad idea well-expressed might not get even the A-.

By the way, the class size in this high school averages in the high teens to low twenties, and the system is well-funded, with a strong and dedicated teaching staff. It is an excellent school by almost any measure. Again, anecdote is not data, but it's what I see.

Gosh. Anyone can get into an elite university if they've got the talent.

Well, maybe.

If you're not from a privileged background, you have to work harder to get into an Ivy League university (Russell Group in the UK); you have to be willing to take on an enormous amount of debt; you have to be willing to do ridiculous amounts of paid work in a week, on top of your academic work.

Well, it's worth it. At least for me. I'll defend my education forever; I earned it. But I know other people with ability who thought that it wasn't worth it. Those barriers kept them out, and that, for me, is wrong.

What I resent is the necessity of working harder to get that education than those who happen to come from a richer background than me (And god, my background's only modest - there are people who struggled much much harder than I did). And I especially resent it when those people don't have a clue just how privileged they are - and Adam Blickstein strikes me as one of those people. He's got the same blithe arrogance - dispensing advice and supposedly informed political opinion while he's drunk. And he's going to be somebody people might vote for in the future? Worse, he's on the side I want to win.

It looks to me at the moment as though Republicans can point to Blickstein and say (tapping into a section of the electorate who have nothing but contempt for intellectuals): "Look at the privileged idiot, who can't even get his point across, is this the kind of person you want to run the country?"

How is Blickstein, when he becomes a politician (and he will), going to reach out to these people?

Onto soundbites, they might be misleading but the good ones aren't hackneyed, or maybe it's that the speaker can make them fresh? I'm thinking of Tony Blair here, and his "She was (pause) the People's Princess." Half the truth, and roundly mocked by commentators, but it articulated what a lot of people seemed to be feeling - it connected with them.

Blickstein's style, as evidenced in that post, is never going to do that.

Well, I'm the Ivy-basher here.

I know about need-blind admissions, but somehow it doesn't work. You still end up with a highly privileged cohort (partly because of differences in HS quality), and the less-privileged students try to fit in. (An exacerbating factor is that a primary goal of education can be helping people escape from their communities in order to join more prosperous communities.)

I think that this is becomes a negative factor when the Democrats rely on Ivyish whiz kids. That makes it harder to establish channels of communication with non-elite communities. (As I keep saying, Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real.) I think that this can be a negative factor in certain types of well-intended service and charitable organizations, which often develop a condescending air.

I didn't say, but should have, that American elite schools provide a tremendous education for motivated, well-prepared students. But it's too easy for the others to slack through, so an Ivy credential doesn't tell you a lot. I get the feeling that the student culture in most schools is not strongly intellectually oriented. A lot of students seem to have specialized in glibness studies and pop culture.

Granted, my comparison is with places like Swarthmore and Reed. (Do I think that all schools should be like Swarthmore and Reed? Pretty much. They do what colleges are supposed to do.)

Patrick (12:58) is hereby absolved of any suspicions of being a Strunk and White advocate.

pat greene writes "Students no longer spend much time learning grammar in middle school (or maybe that's just in California)"

Anecdote: in 1959 I was in 4th grade at a public school in Lomita, Ca and got jumped half-a-grade up. We moved across town and I transferred into a Catholic school in Westwood. The nuns gave me a grammar test in order to determine which grade I should go into, and I couldn't identify the verb in a sentence. I went back to 4th grade.

And this was back when California schools were among the best-funded in the nation, long before Prop. 13.

Your complaint is valid but not new.

Republican populism is fake, but Democratic elitism is real.

uuhhmmm....

oh, never mind.

Patrick (12:58)

Why give a citation if you're not going to quote the verse? Is that one of the Gnostic Gospels?

I was a graduate student at Yale. The undergraduates there are uniformly bright and ethnically diverse. They are also children of privilege; half of their families receive no financial aid. This leads to fundamental blind spots when these talented folks are solely relied on for tasks like political commentary.

The best example that I can think of is the offhand comment by Yglesias that there is no reason at all not to raise the retirement age. After all, many of the professionals that he knows continue to work well past 70! Steve Gilliard had to wield the righteous clue stick to remind Dalton-schooled Matt that retirement means something different for a pipefitter than it does for an English professor. Style is only part of the problem.

If you want a short course in how an Ivy education can go slightly rancid, head down to your local library and check out a copy of Mind Over Water, by Craig Lambert. Although it's puportedly about sculling, its theme changes gradually from "I was so lucky to go to Harvard" to something along the lines of "This is such a lucky world to have Harvard in it, and Harvard men to rule over it."

I stopped reading then, and I never found out if he took that thought to the logical conclusion: "Kneel before the King, serf!"

It's not the education, it's the entitlement.

My Yale degree made it unfairly easy for me to get my first job as a waitress – a job that compensated me handsomely while I prepared for my first art show. Furthermore, all of that social education and stalking-the-corridors-of-power training ensured that I always offered the correct spoon and gave good wine advice to the young Wall Street Stud-dogs who made up the restaurant’s clientele…

What I found interesting about your exchange with Blickstein is that it’s pretty clear from his responses that he doesn’t understand the real nature of the criticism at all.

Yes the language is always decaying and changing, but this points to the possibility that it is now decaying in new way. His posts are not so much sloppy writing as they are sloppy conversation (college dining hall conversation perhaps) rendered as writing.

The graduate students that I teach don’t seem to make the distinction between spoken and written speech that I was raised on. They live by IM and texting and Powerpoint. It’s all one big soup of communication. They get their point across, but it has more to do with momentum than precision. I thank all of you supporters of the well written word for speaking up.

Was there ever a time in recent memory that people were routinely taught grammar in high school?

It certainly didn't happen at my school (the neighborhood public HS on Staten Island). I was crammed full of parts-of-speech during a brief private-school stint in junior high, but my classmates who had gone to the public I.S. were not. In high school, when SAT panic struck they several times, with increasing desperation, tried to get the English dept to offer them a real grammar-and-composition class, and were flatly refused: grammar-and-composition were not part of the H.S. curriculum, they should have learned that stuff in junior high, and just because no one had ever bothered to teach it to them was no reason to expect the H.S. English dept to make up the deficiency. Not their job.

This was 30 years ago. The good old days? I don't think so...

Excuse me, "decaying in _a_ new way."

I was taught grammar in HS (starting in eighth grade), but I guess that doesn't count as "recent memory".

But if you're running a paper, what you need are highly motivated news junkies with lots of contacts and city smarts; and if that's who you hire, it's guaranteed that many of them will have spotty backgrounds, and some of them will have nonstandard looks and manners.

That's one of Steve Gilliard's long running themes, that is, the way in which not just newspapers but also socalled progressive publications are still so whitebread.