intellectual torture

So my husband came home from class tonight mourning the inability of his fellow students to write in good, proper English. Now, I know that what determines a paper to be well written or passable English is a very long, very grey-colored scale.

So I read a paper for myself. Ouch. Talk about failed English classes… grammar errors, run-on sentences, a complete failure to write a smooth paragraph. No such thing as transitions — not to mention the same idea going from sentence to sentence! Oh, and I could not neglect the lack of knowledge about how to write English… if you read the paper aloud it wouldn’t make sense!

So how do these people get into graduate school if they can’t even write! How do you get past all of those papers? Are we really training the future teachers and guardians of our knowledge to get by on a mediocre writing skills? Have we fallen that far? Have our standards regressed so much that we are willing to let these people get by because we cannot hold them to a scholarly level that generations of scientists, historians, authors, etc., were held to for several hundred years?

What happened to our standards? Since when did GRADUATE SCHOOL WRITING MEAN THE SAME THING AS COLLEGE FRESHMAN (or high school senior?) WRITING? CAN WE AFFORD TO CONTINUE TO SUPPORT THIS? SHOULD WE ENCOURAGE PEOPLE TO BECOME SOMETHING, NOT BECAUSE THEY CAN, BUT BECAUSE WE’LL LOWER THE STANDARDS SO THEY ARE ABLE?

All I see is a pattern of continued lowering of intellectual standards… because how DARE we want the scholarly elite to become the keepers of our history, our culture? No, that’s too mean. We can’t exclude persons B, C, F, G H, J, and M, N, P, R, S, W, X, Y, and, yes, Z on the basis that they can’t write, can’t think, and obviously have never been held to a standard at all in their lives.

I think its disgusting.