Stenglish

Altho I love my students, st they drive me crazy to. There writing can be truely horrible, a combo bt college shorthand, txt msg lingo, and simple laziness. Oh w8, I frogot when their ina rush.

Although I have yet to receive a sentence as bad as the one I wrote above, it is a fact that a lot of the papers and assignments I receive are written as though the student has never met an English teacher in their life. I call their particular brand of English Stenglish, or Student English. Sentences run on and on and on and on, or stop in the middle of a thought. Paragraphs come and go without any logic, topic sentence, or apparent structure, sometimes leaving me to wonder if a student decided to insert a new paragraph when they did because it looked pretty. Students will use shorthand in serious research papers (“This is not an instance of hegemony bc of…”), forget to use proper punctuation (“There are two main views ritual and transmission”), sound just odd (“your first response is going to be come on be more picking”), or resort to very convoluted language (“Being that it may be that..”).

I realize that the complaint that “back in the day” students used to write better, work harder, and show more enthusiasm is as old as time itself. And I don’t necessarily believe that. My students are incredibly enthusiastic and some of them do try very hard, but at times they all just seem to suffer from proper-Englishitis.

Now I would love to argue that it’s content that matters, and not form, but I just can’t. I figure that just knowing about something isn’t enough; you need to know how to communicate about it too. And even in today’s multi-media environment, writing is still the main tool used for communication.

It’s easy to blame the Internet or cell phones for this development, but I’m not too sure about that. I text, blog, email, and use Facebook as much as my students, and yet I generally know where to put my commas. I’m not sure what’s going on. Some of my co-workers lament about the sorry state of the Georgia public school system. They argue that the No Child Left Behind Act has made schools dedicate more and more time to preparing their students for the annual standardized tests. Time they used to spend teaching students the art of writing. And maybe they’re right. I remember learning about the different forms of essay writing as early as 8^th grade. Yet last semester, when I talked to my Editorial and Critical Writing students about how the basic intro-body-conclusion outline of an essay applies to an editorial too, I got a whole class full of blank stares. And is it true that my students are absolutely wizzes when it comes to answering multiple choice questions.

Whatever the reason may be (and in all honesty, I don’t really care), I’m stuck with dozens of students who struggle to write flowing, grammatically correct, and properly punctuated prose. So last year I decided I could ignore this Stenglish (Student English) problem no more and broke out my old writing manuals. So now, next to comments about significance levels, myth development, and ethics, my students can now also find remarks such as “needs comma”, or “insert topic sentence” in the margins of their paper. Right. I think I definitely care too much.