PUT DIFFERENTLY JUNE 16, 2011
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Sarah Palin’s emails are telling us something about remedial writing classes at our universities and colleges, and it’s not what you think. Call her defensive or parochial based on the cache of her spontaneous writings while serving as governor of Alaska, but something easy to miss is that Palin, in contrast to her meandering, involuted speaking style, is a thoroughly competent writer—more so than a great many people most of us likely know, including college graduates.
Indeed, her facility in writing proves something one might be pardoned for supposing she was exaggerating about in Going Rogue, her autobiography, in which she limns a childhood portrait of herself as a bibliophilic sort of tot:
Reading was a special bond between my mother and me. Mom read aloud to me – poetry by Ogden Nash and the Alaska poet Robert Service, along with snippets of prose …. My siblings were better athletes, cuter and more sociable than I, and the only thing they had to envy about me was the special passion for reading that I shared with our mother.
That’s right, Sarah “you betcha” Palin was, of all things, a bookworm, excited to learn to spell “different” and winning a poetry contest for a poem about Betsy Ross. And as such, it is predictable that her emails would evidence such casually solid command of the language—even if her oral rendition of it is a different matter entirely.
Once we understand that, it leads to some serious questions, as posed by books getting buzz at present such as Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa’s Academically Adrift and In the Basement of the Ivory Tower by the anonymous “Professor X.” How sensible is our assigning millions of freshmen each year to classes intended to teach them a skill so deeply rooted in unconscious facilitation at an early age?
To get a sense, it helps to see a few of these emails. Because email is written speech, it’s easy to miss artfulness in them. Yet, take this Palin passage: “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.”
The spelling is flawless—and unlikely to be completely a product of spell-check, which misses errors and often creates others. More to the point, she has an embedded clause (“locking up tax rates”) nested into a main one, with another clause “as Glenn suggests” nested within the embedded one. That’s good old-fashioned grammar school “syntax.” I have known plenty of people with B.A.s who could barely pull it off properly at gunpoint, and several others who would only bother to at gunpoint.
Equally graceful despite its mundane content: “Cowdery telling a kid what’s acceptable and what isn’t inside these four walls??? Puleeeze. A three-pound puppy vs. all the CBC crap that he helped dump around here?” You hear an actual human voice here. We tell some people “I can hear your voice in the way you write”—because it’s unusual for people to be able to “write” themselves. Palin is one of the people who can.
And yet, the oratorical Palin is the swivel-tongue we all know—which means that Palin demonstrates with almost scientific precision that writing well stems not from general linguistic ability, but the specific activity of reading early. Thus, if our ideal is that all American adults write with ease, grace, and natural expression, then Palin is a handy demonstration that it would be more effective to make all tots avid readers than for legions of teenagers to sit in remedial writing classes long after their brain wiring and avocational predilections have jelled.
The anonymous “Professor X” certainly thinks so: “The two most crucial ingredients in the mysterious mix that makes a good writer may be (1) having read enough throughout a lifetime to have internalized the rhythms of the written word, and (2) refining the ability to mimic those rhythms.” The problem, of course, is that human variation in makeup and experience is too heterogenous for all children to ever be readers. Yet the view from remedial writing classes is not sunny. Professor X, for example, has taken flak for statements like the aforementioned, but how many of us can recount one 18-year-old whose writing was shot through with run-ons, fragments, off spellings, and no sense of what a paragraph is, who, after a nice remedial writing class, came out writing even as well as Sarah Palin! Or if one, how about two?
Stanley Fish entered these waters a couple of years ago as well, usefully describing a situation familiar to anyone who has taught or been involved with remedial writing programs of this kind:
A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program.
In the piranha attack from composition teachers in the comments section, there was evidence that we may have less of a problem than we suppose, but in a sense different than the commenters would have assumed. The main objection was that students do, presumably, learn to “think” in such classes. However, the minimal focus on actual skills in constructing sentences was indicative. One sensed little interest, really, in whether students learned to compose text properly.
And this isn’t surprising. Note the near universal approval with which the SAT eliminated word analogies. A major spark for that decision was a speech in 2001 by then-University of California president Richard Atkinson, which garnered widespread accolades for its argument that imposing lists of vocabulary on teenagers was a backwards, useless affair. To agree with Atkinson and yet claim a sincere interest in the same students learning how to write well just a year later is senseless. Wouldn’t learning the meanings of words like provocative, consummate, interminable, facile, and prolific be directly useful to the skills that the writing classes are supposed to inculcate?
In the grand scheme of things, those tacitly uninterested in whether all students can compose articulate text and more interested in students being able to “think” are on to something they don’t realize. Namely, while functional writing should be instilled in all, writing of a grace and deftness beyond that level is but one of a great many ways one can be of value to society. If we want more graceful writers, let’s encourage more avid and precocious reading where we can, but, please, less of the painful remedial writing courses foisted upon those for whom it appears to do little good.
These are the kinds of things that Sarah Palin’s emails might make us think about. Verdicts will differ, but nota bene: We must be wary of resorting to the objection that critical thought is impossible without avid, effortless fluency with the written word. That claim has no empirical justification—and, moreover, subjects most human beings on earth, including many we know, to grievous insult and underestimation.
John McWhorter is a contributing editor at The New Republic.
34 comments
It's a leap to suggest that the fact that Palin is an ok writer stems from the fact that she enjoyed reading as a child (assuming we even take that assertion of hers at face value). What about her non-reading sibs? Can they write too? This thought experiment is hurting for lack of controls. And even if it's true that early love of reading is associated with good writing later on, it does not necessarily follow that remediation is a waste of time.
- AaronW
June 16, 2011 at 12:16am
I mean, how do you know that Palin did not herself take a freshman comp course? Maybe she did and her writing benefitted. Have you reviewed her college transcript?
- AaronW
June 16, 2011 at 12:19am
I feel that the quality of her writing in this article is overrated and it reminds me of George W. Bush being a success if he didn't perform as badly or appear as ignorant as he seemed. I admit that reading the emails is a lot less grating than listening to Palin speak and that reading will influence the quality of writing, but I just don't see the quality of her writing as exemplary.
- Nusholtz
June 16, 2011 at 5:03am
I don't get the point. We generally have reason not to take very seriously much that Palin says but when it comes to her statements about the source of her skills at writing email the author takes her at face value. Maybe there other things to consider -- for example, that the skill of writing short administrative communications about narrowly defined subjects is essentially different from the skill of making public spoken statements about national policy. And consider this those readers who, like me, can't stand her politics, she is no dope: how many of us have made millions in two years and in the process become a national celebrity? And as for remedial writing courses, I say better late than never. (Using Stanley Fish as authority for anything is a serious mistake -- the man is consistently wrong.) I my own experience, I'm still learning new skills and information and ways of looking at the world, while actively working long past the age of normal retirement. It would be a shame to end remedial writing because it is not always successful. Should we close hospitals because not everyone is cured?
- PeteBeck
June 16, 2011 at 6:43am
Palin is a classic example of the Peter Principle. The short e-mails indicate she had some grasp of the job she had been elected to perform in Alaska. She may write well in that format, but it was a mistake to attempt to promote here beyond her capabilities.
- johnculli
June 16, 2011 at 9:25am
Where to start? First, using a sample of her autobiography that uses strange syntax (what is the ellipsis doing between two sentences?) and a glaring grammatical error ("cuter and more sociable than I," should read "... than me,") is probably not the best way to make a point about her ability as a writer. Second, the early reading leads to good writing hypothesis is far from a generally accepted explanation of writing ability. I can say, understanding fully that this is just anecdotal, not a counter study, that I know one adult who didn't read on their own until age 8, but is an excellent writer of both professional and casual prose, and another who read early and constantly, but couldn't write a sentence at age 16, and then became an excellent writer of technical and casual prose by the time they entered college. I have personally mentored several young adults who came out of college unable to write clearly, correctly or convincingly, and seen them become excellent written communicators in a couple of years in their profession - almost certainly due mostly to the motivation provided by their job more than my skill as a teacher. If I were grading this essay on Palin as a writer, I'd give it a pass on argumentation, but a fail on choice and use of evidence.
- IowaBeauty
June 16, 2011 at 9:28am
...cuter and more sociable than I," should read "... than me,") ... Department of nit picks: it's "than I." That's because we say "than I am" and not "than me am." She's wrote her emails well enough; and that's about all she wrote.
- basman
June 16, 2011 at 9:38am
IowaBeauty and basman are both mistaken; "than" can be either a conjunction ("than I [am]") or a preposition ("than me").
- mnkoplow
June 16, 2011 at 9:45am
To piggy-back on IowaBeauty: what of the great writers who came to write in English later in life, as their second or third language? Conrad, Nabokov and, more recently, Aleksandar Hemon, all mastered the art of writing in English without having read the language in their youth.
- macphail
June 16, 2011 at 10:09am
That doesn't right mnkoplow. We need a grammar ruling. Who can dispense grammatical justice here with no right or need of appeal?
- basman
June 16, 2011 at 10:57am
The issue is vexed: http://grammar.quickanddirtytips.com/than-I-versus-than-me.aspx
- basman
June 16, 2011 at 11:03am
After than and as introducing an incomplete construction, use the form of the pronoun you would use if the construction were completed. I like Gerald better than he (likes Gerald) I like Gerald better than him (than I like him) “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.” I do not find this sentence to be as clear as it can be. Why not use the relative pronoun that after admitted? One nit picky point, "More to the point, she has an embedded clause (“locking up tax rates”) nested into a main one" Locking up tax rates is not a subordinate clause. that (the relative pronoun is understood) locking up tax rates is unacceptable is a subordinate clause. And I simply do not find writing a single complex sentence to be that awe inspiring. And one last nit picky point...shouldn't the sentence be: “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates, as Glenn suggests, is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.” As Glenn suggests is a nonrestrictive clause and is set off by commas, it merely adds an idea to the sentence but is not necessary to the meaning of the sentence. “Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.” So I think McWhorter is wrong.
- blackton
June 16, 2011 at 11:37am
I don't see "locking up tax rates" as an "embedded clause." Rather it is a noun made up of a gerund and an object of the verb that is the basis of the gerund. Or to put it differently, the sentence in form is no different than "Even CP has admitted that a tax freeze is unacceptable." Same idea, slightly different words, same grammar. I learned abut gerunds in 11th grade in a good but not great high school.
- PeteBeck
June 16, 2011 at 1:00pm
I find this article mystifying. It supports a sweeping argument (early reading drives later writing skills) on an extremely thin reed: one person who claims that she read a lot as a child writes reasonably good emails even though she tends to speak word salad. And the first example of strong writing is "Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution." I had to read this sentence more than once. First I thought CP had admitted to locking up tax rates. And CP locked them up not just in any old way, but in the way Glenn suggests. I still am not sure whether Glenn's version of locking up rates is unacceptable or whether Glenn was the first to suggest that locking up tax rates is unacceptable. Does she mean "Even CP has admitted that locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution." or "Even CP has admitted that locking up tax rates, as Glenn suggests, is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution." Without the "that" after admitted, I didn't know whether to insert a "that" or a "to". Without the commas, I need far more context to parse her meaning. The sentence felt like one crash blossom after another. (If you are reading this far into the comments, you will definitely want to google "crash blossom"). There wasn't a better sentence to illustrate the point?
- rjb9
June 16, 2011 at 1:10pm
I strongly endorse the position that beginning reading in early life is the best leg up to being able to express yourself in writing later on.
- ironyroad
June 16, 2011 at 1:13pm
That wasn't just my opinion; it was the ruling of Merriam-Webster's 11th Collegiate Dictionary. In some cases, it's ambiguous; in most, it isn't. That's language for you. Sometimes things are ambiguous, and sometimes there's more than one right way to say things. I agree with Pete Beck that "that" would have helped muchly.
- mnkoplow
June 16, 2011 at 1:57pm
The complexity you admire in her emails is exactly what trips her up so badly when speaking. It can happen to anyone, but it happens frequently and spectacularly with Ms. Palin. The question that interest me is why is she so bad at untangling (or unstacking) all of her nested clauses when speaking. I have worked with people for whom the need to put out an answer immediately completely trumps any need that the answer be correct, or even plausible. Palin's behavior does not seem very different. I have imagined that this unwillingness to be seen as hesitating signals an emotional or confidence deficit.
- aduncanson
June 16, 2011 at 2:00pm
...I strongly endorse the position that beginning reading in early life is the best leg up to being able to express yourself in writing later on... Well, it soytenlly couldn't hoit
- basman
June 16, 2011 at 2:18pm
Gut gezugt!
- ironyroad
June 16, 2011 at 3:12pm
Maybe - and I hate to say this - Palin gets confused when speaking precisely because she sees complexity in the world. That's a sign of intelligence is it not? Under pressure, not everybody can speak clearly and well about complex issues. So the fact that she gets confused isn't necessarily a sign of her being a fool. Writing though - I don't see where there can possibly be argument against reading. The comment that Nabokov didn't read English as a child doesn't wash - he almost certainly read in Russian. Clearly we should be encouraging young people to read. However, given the tube and other media blandishments that's going to be an increasingly tall order. PS - when I went to college in 1967 we had a remedial English class - and this was a college where 45% of my freshman class had attended expensive private prep schools.
- Sophia
June 16, 2011 at 4:43pm
I'm not amazingly impressed by the Palinian prose here, but I can't argue with the idea that reading makes for better writers. I've taught a few "don't call them remedial" English 101 writing courses in the last couple of years to students generally from upper-middle-class families; many had gone to private schools. It's clear that they haven't done much reading, or at least certainly not much on their own. For example, although native speakers, their use of prepositions with adjectives and verbs is unidiomatic (along the lines of writing "interested of" rather than "...in"), and their vocabulary is limited and informal, both of which hint at lack of exposure. Another piece of evidence, I think, is their habit -- which colleagues at other schools have noted as well -- of referring to any book whatsoever as a "novel," even if it's a nonfiction textbook or an epic poem. They don't have any real understanding of genre. I have to imagine that a few English classes did throw some novels at them, and so they use the term for "any self-contained book I'm forced to read at school." They had had instruction in English, of course, as was clear from common hypercorrections (liberal use of "whom" in writing regardless of syntax, or of "in which" for "which" -- I think this last could result ultimately from trying to avoid ending sentences in prepositions). Even so, they did not really internalize any "rules" because they seem not to have read many examples of the language in action. Naturally, remedial writing courses traditionally link assignments to a few model essays, but a one-semester course can do only so much.
- frippo
June 17, 2011 at 12:14am
Frippo I've been away from liberal arts for just under 40 years. I believe you when you describe the kind of poor writing you encounter in the remedial courses you teach. But I'm stunned by how badly first year university kids who have seemingly gone to good high schools and private schools write. Lack of reading good prose must be part of the reason. _______________________________________________________ Slightly a propos, herewith Joesph Epstein's review of Stanley Fish's How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One: June 2011 http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053
- basman
June 17, 2011 at 12:55am
Sophia, I believe it to be true “that if you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it clearly.” Palin gets confused when she doesn’t understand clearly what she’s talking about. I do not impugn her intelligence when I say this. I simply mean she proceeds publicly, in the times I’ve seen her, by rote talking points interspersed with slogans and clichés. I have yet to see her give a deliberate and reasoned answer to any question requiring a complex response. Palin, in her overabundant, undaunted self confidence, is calm enough under pressure—witness her coming out speech at the Republican convention—especially when interviewed by sympathetic hosts. I’m not so concerned with whether Palin is essentially a fool, though I don’t believe her to be. I’m just , to repeat, struck by how consistently poorly she answers substantive question. The clarity of her emails, it seems to me, doesn’t help her much at all in that respect. In fact, I'd like to see an example of her non ghostwritten, extended prose.
- basman
June 17, 2011 at 1:18am
Thanks for that link, Basman. The last thing I'd want to teach students is how to Mad-Libs their way through an essay with the aid of a few arbitrarily chosen model sentences. (Many of them do get a similar workout on their own, of course, when they seek synonyms to disguise text that they've lifted entirely from somewhere on the internet.)
- frippo
June 17, 2011 at 11:09am
I'm sure this is a great article, but it can't be read because there's no way to click off the ads in my version. As a paid TNR subscriber, I'm miffed.
- ngever
June 17, 2011 at 12:59pm
ngever Try retrieving it through Firefox.
- basman
June 17, 2011 at 4:42pm
frippo, I've experienced exactly that weird phenomenon of the generous and uncontrolled use of the term "novel" to cover a whole menu of printed texts it was never meant to apply to. And even at times -- astonishgly -- among students who have elected to be English majors. I must say, though, that it first hit me a few years ago when I arrived in Tennessee, and I don't recall encountering the habit when I taught in California in the late '90s and early '00s. I also concur on the preposition havoc. I have found, also, that if one talks one-on-one with an individual student and asks him or her to read out their problematic sentence, they stumble over it every time because they would not make the same error in speech. What remains mysterious to me is the new (?) disconnect between speech and writing -- in some way they know instinctively, as native English speakers, what the correct preposition is, but they can't access that knowledge in writing.
- ironyroad
June 18, 2011 at 12:49am
There are many good comments here, especially from Basman. For others, there is a lesson: don't nitpick on grammar if you don't know what you're talking about. Finally, I have found the lack of ability of many law students to write intractable. How do you disrupt the lack of a vocabulary that results in frequent attempts to make words mean something that do not mean at all? Next, I like the idea of making sure kids read, but what of this? Many of them are reading on the internet and absorbing really bad writing in comment sections, email, text messaging, and the like. Perhaps we need to develop some counterpart to the spelling bee that involves contests over answering obscure syntax questions and word meanings and other obscurities involving homonyms, derivation, etc.. You could have a new version of those high school competitions for trivia. Kids could classify syntax problems in sentences, define words, identify homonyms, rewrite bad sentences, and rate variations on sentences that take a different approach to expressing an idea. We rarely talk about editing in public. Let's create some lively outlets for doing edits in public.
- Walpole
June 18, 2011 at 10:02am
In my comment, I said not to nitpick on grammar if you do not know what you are talking about. Fortunately, I said nothing about finding typographical errors. Also, a rewrite of my third sentence might be helpful: The inability of many law students to write is seemingly intractable.
- Walpole
June 18, 2011 at 10:14am
Or: "The inability of many law students to write is a seemingly intractable problem" (which avoids the odd-sounding implication of an intractable inability)? "One seemingly intractable problem is the inability . . . " would work too.
- ironyroad
June 18, 2011 at 1:35pm
ironyroad, thanks for the help. I actually wish to say, as to each law student who cannot write, the deficiency of that person, once established, is intractable. I do not mean to say that the problem of the frequently occurring inability of law students to write is intractable, since I believe that boot camps starting at kindergarten to force children to learn Latin and write essays and read books would produce law students who could write. To achieve this, though, we probably need to institute tyranny. The project would also benefit if we could revive the dead, bringing back to the classroom the teachers who once instilled grammar in young Americans stuck in rural schools, Brooklyn, or other such places.
- Walpole
June 18, 2011 at 8:00pm
This is a very strange piece, on a number of levels. There is, for example, the unexamined and apparently unrecognized conflict between two of its principal assertions - that Palin is a skillful writer who has the rare ability to communicate her spoken voice on the page, and that her spoken voice is meandering, ungrammatical, even "swivel-tongued." Well. Which is it? I am also at a loss to understand why this sentence impressed McWhorter: "“Even CP has admitted locking up tax rates as Glenn suggests is unacceptable to the legislature, the Alaskan public, this administration, and the Constitution.” Perhaps in its context this is comprehensible. In this context, it's missing some connective tissue and punctuation. How about "admitted that locking up tax rates" and "would be unacceptable." And "locking up"? What does that mean. I suppose this may be fine in context, but here it looks like another Palinism - a mishmash of clauses that aren't really strung together properly. Several other good points - for example, that the little known about Palin gives very weak and uncertain support to McWhorter's sweeping theory - have already been made and I second them.
- Usrname
June 19, 2011 at 11:48am
Writing emails well is not irrefutable proof that one can consistently write coherently or cogently. Hell, the proof is written on these comments, where the brevity of the format subconsciously entices one to write quickly while still trying to write well. Even the best of us don't succeed 100% of the time. Palin's emails really only exhibit her capacity to write slightly better than she speaks but the formal act of having to write her thoughts out only blurs the actual capacity of her writing capabilities. One would think that the formality of hold the Governorship would cause you to write more formally and 'wordsmithing' what you write prior to sending it out. I know that if I were writing something, even in casual email correspondence as Governor, I would not use the phonetic spelling of "phuleeze" to emphasis the condescending tone I was trying to get across to someone. It also speaks volumes to level of respect you hold for yourself as well as your intended reader in the way you write said correspondence. The very act of writing a composition on a computer versus the act of writing on a typewriter versus writing the same composition long hand differ greatly in how one thinks and the time spent composing those thoughts. I find that even the act of writing thoughts with a ballpoint pen compared to a fountain pen affects my writing process. Take that further with the differences between block and script writing. (Apologies for the aside, I am filling my inkwells as I type.) The speed in which you can edit your thoughts on the screen compared to how you edit your handwritten letters is also a big factor in how you take care in composing your thoughts, choice of words and the matter in which you write. I discovered while taking several creative writing courses in college, that the tone, vocabulary, sentence structures, conciseness and rhythm in which I wrote was affected consciously and subconsciously by the literature I was reading at the time. Writing a short story after reading Nabakov or Melville is affected very differently than writing a short story after reading Jim Thompson or William S. Burroughs. It takes a great deal of practice to develop one's own writing style, voice and tone. That really only comes from serious writing in various formats. Critical essays, research papers, character sketches, short stories, etc. All of these formats carry a similar "voice" when I write but that has come from years of being required to write. Even architects must put pen to paper for things other than drawing. I think McWhorter stretches the limits of his thesis in trying to apply Palin's well-readness and her cache of seemingly well-written but brief emails as counter-evidence that Palin is a dunce. Nor is the thesis a strong argument that Palin is an excellent writer. Good enough perhaps. But until she can speak as well as she writes, I will hold my tongue and typing before extending her as much credit as McWhorter wants to giver her.
- singlspeed
June 21, 2011 at 6:08pm
"give" not "giver" her.
- singlspeed
June 21, 2011 at 6:11pm