Proofreading as a trade has just plain evaporated in the past fifteen years. This article both demonstrates and explains that.
I still wonder what the reason is for this decline in literacy. It's one of those odd causal spirals -- people read less, so they're less practiced at it, so it's harder to do, so they do it less, etc.; and then that inexperience at reading only makes the work of learning to write all the more difficult and frustrating.
And certainly it turns the mechanics of punctuation and grammar from something one absorbed fairly easily from reading and then just fine-tuned with formal instruction in elementary school and junior high, into something totally arcane and unlearnable; and that feeling makes it even easier for curricula to sidetrack, defer, and eventually dismiss every approach to writing other than the unstructured spraying of one's feeeeelings onto paper. (Rousseau's noble savage would never stop to consider his commas!)
The iteration of this process across a few generations has produced a perfect impasse: the complex art of nonfiction writing, as a mix of clarity and reasoning and aesthetics, is taught poorly by people to whom it was never taught well, according to unsuccessful curricula designed by people who have only ever known unsuccessful curricula. When students learn, it is in spite of this deadlock. It is confounding and compounding.
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Date: 2005-12-18 02:28 am (UTC)Proofreading as a trade has just plain evaporated in the past fifteen years. This article both demonstrates and explains that.
I still wonder what the reason is for this decline in literacy. It's one of those odd causal spirals -- people read less, so they're less practiced at it, so it's harder to do, so they do it less, etc.; and then that inexperience at reading only makes the work of learning to write all the more difficult and frustrating.
And certainly it turns the mechanics of punctuation and grammar from something one absorbed fairly easily from reading and then just fine-tuned with formal instruction in elementary school and junior high, into something totally arcane and unlearnable; and that feeling makes it even easier for curricula to sidetrack, defer, and eventually dismiss every approach to writing other than the unstructured spraying of one's feeeeelings onto paper. (Rousseau's noble savage would never stop to consider his commas!)
The iteration of this process across a few generations has produced a perfect impasse: the complex art of nonfiction writing, as a mix of clarity and reasoning and aesthetics, is taught poorly by people to whom it was never taught well, according to unsuccessful curricula designed by people who have only ever known unsuccessful curricula. When students learn, it is in spite of this deadlock. It is confounding and compounding.
We are all the Jamaican bobsled team.