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So I get the point of schools asking for shorter and shorter writing samples on their applications. I do. In a lot of ways, you can learn more about applicants via shorter responses than longer ones, and are more likely to get an honest look at those applicants than you will if you ask them to craft something that feels like a school assignment.
But the mean, misanthropic part of me has a different take. In my former life as an associate editor of Campus Progress, I edited a lot of college students’ writing. I saw the future of American prose every day, and that future was grim, poorly punctuated, and riddled with to/too errors. That’s not to say that I didn’t work with a large number of really talented young writers, because I did. On the whole, though—and yes, this will make me sound much older and crotchety than I am—I was shocked by the extent to which “kids these days” can’t write.
And it wasn’t just restricted to the colleges at the “third-tier” schools, or whatever obnoxious label you want to stick on certain institutions. This was an across-the-board phenomenon, from the Ivy Leagues on down. Students struggled with really basic issues, too, stuff that any decent high school English class should drill into a pupil by the time he or she is a sophomore.
The solution obviously isn’t to make it harder for poor writers to get into schools, so maybe this was more of a jumping-off point for my standard kids-can’t-write rant than anything. But it is a problem, and based on my (yes, purely anecdotal) experience, a lot of students graduate from college completely unable to put together a decent-looking document of any type or length.
(Given its content, there is no way this post doesn’t contain at least one or two grammatical and/or spelling errors. I would like to deflect the ire of commenters by preemptively acknowledging this. Thank you.)
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Emily on September 23, 2009 5:03 PM:
Hey now, watch who you're calling poorly-punctuated!
Just kidding--but seriously, mechanical errors aren't so much the problem. It's that college essays are very, very difficult to write--and a good short essay is even harder to write than a good long one. Crafting a really well-written personal essay is not something that could be taught even in a *good* secondary school English program, much less in most of the rather mediocre-to-awful high-school English classes in this country.
But if we're not too focused on writing something absolutely brilliant, I guess I can see the point of requiring shorter essays that are less "essays" than "responses." Requiring someone to go on at length and come up with something interesting to say is like requiring them to do mathematical proofs or analyze polling data or win a game of tennis. Essay-writing is a fairly specialized talent that I'm not even sure it's reasonable to expect every college applicant to be able to pull off well.
Carol on October 16, 2009 12:45 PM:
I totally agree with you. I just took classes with college juniors and seniors that involved group writing and was amazed at many of the students' lack of writing and editing skills. Many students couldn't structure essays, and I was having to explain passive voice over and over again. I was the editor on all of my groups' compositions because nobody else knew how to make corrections. I also had trouble with some other students trying to copy and paste their assigned parts from the Internet.