The obsolescence of words

WHEN THEY ARE not bemoaning the readily observable decline in the verbal ability of today's youth, parents and educators are usually looking for a villain: permissiveness, decline of standards, overcrowded classes, television. All of these factors have doubtless contributed to the decline, but more fundamental is a cultural attitude that never gets discussed. If our students do not write well it is because we do not, our protestations to the contrary, really value good writing.

The eminence of the written word has traditionally resided in two characteristics that distinguish it from other forms of communication:
•  The precision afforded by revision and editing.
•  The uniqueness of expression and point of view, the reader's awareness of style, of his being addressed by a single and distinctive consciousness.

Legal language attempts to achieve the first without the second; sponta-neous speech, where it is not riddled with cliches and other prefabricated phrases, aspires to the second condition while ignoring the first. In the past, writing well was a highly regarded accomplishment because the struggle to attain precision and unique expression was seen as a noble strife. The writer was a kind of hero, a solitary who, availing himself of nothing more than the resources of naked language, sought earnestly to communicate to an unseen audience in the most persuasive way he could.

One need hardly be reminded that that age of heroism is past. To wrestle with one's ideas, to intimate that there might even be a contest, is no part of today's culture. Even allowing for the informality and egalitarianism of the present time, inarticulateness and even incoherence seem to impose no bar to professional recognition or advancement. The unimaginative bureaucrat is puffed into a charismatic leader through well-rehearsed gestures and ghostwritten speeches; the actor ascends to stardom not by mastering his craft but by cultivating his personahty, a thing unaccomplishable without a press agent; the television newscaster or advertiser recites his copy with uniformly bland sincerity -- he is not required to know the import of what he is saying. In all these instances we perceive a disjunction between the speaker and his utterance. And in our society's tolerance of this disjunction lies youth's distrust of prepared discourse.

To be sure, a facility in written language is not despised, but it is regarded less as a medium of self-realization than as a useful skill, like the ability to type or to drive a car. A marketable skill, moreover. A colleague of mine recently professed shock at learning that a former student had upon graduation taken a job as a writer of term papers. The experience she had acquired in four years of composing such exercises in college had ironically qualified her for a professional career in English literature after all. But like all forms of prostitution, the one just described requires not only a seller and a buyer, but the tolerance -- even the tacit connivance -- of society. As long as we continue to prize the product rather than the process of composition, as long as jargon, bureaucratic abstractions, and other forms of impersonal discourse impose themselves upon us as legitimate specimens of English prose, we can neither expect much moral fastidiousness with regard to plagiarism, nor persuade young people that it is at all worth the bother to take the pains to write well.

The displacement of the dictionary by the Guinness Book of Records as a popular reference work is symptomatic of the growing obsolescence of words.

While language is still useful as a means of illustrating the relations between quantities of things, the rhetoric of words is rapidly being supplanted by the rhetoric of numbers -- statistics -- a mode preferred as more "scientific" because the quantification of data appears to screen out subjective and idiosyncratic biases. It also screens out the processes of human thought, which composition celebrates. Those attributes of written discourse, precision and uniqueness, which alone validate the pains of composition, have no particular value for the statistician.

The absence of literary techniques from nonliterary discourse is hardly tragic nor even to be deplored. The world has no need for government documents in blank verse or scientific abstracts fraught with double entendres. Yet the values that might engender such chimeras -- the strong belief that writing reflects thought and that thought is a uniquely personal process -- are precisely those that inform "good writing" of any kind. Without such faith our language becomes flaccid, mechanical, opaque. Yet our students inhabit a world without such a faith. They see about them little evidence of the overwhelming power of personal utterance and consequently have little incentive to attempt it themselves. Forced to write only under external pressure, they of course perform badly.

This, I submit, we have scarcely attempted. An educational system that measures writing competency by means of a machine-scored, multiple-choice examination hardly inspires confidence in the enterprises either of reading or of writing. The radical reformation of student attitudes that we seek can come about only by approaching the act of writing as a craft rather than a skill and by receiving the writer's accomplishment as the attainment of a hazardous quest rather than as the assembly of a printed circuit -- in short by a restoration to all forms of composition of the concept of authorship.

Ira Grushow is chairman of the English department at Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, Pa. His article is reprinted with permission from the author and The Chronicle of Higher Education.