Ben Yagoda is an author and professor and on to something when he identifies a new-ish sort of bad writing, which he calls ?clunk.? One reads about pupils who blithely insert into school assignments text-message phrases such as LOL and various emoticons?e.g., . And perhaps this does frequently happen? in middle schools and high schools. But Yagoda, who teaches college students, has never seen it. ?Students,? he writes, ?realize that this kind of thing is in the wrong register for a college assignment (even an assignment for my classes, which for the most part cover journalism, broadly defined?that is, writing for publication in newspapers and magazines, in print or online).? Rather than abbreviate?sentences, Yagoda's students lengthen them, clunk them up with all types of extraneous parts. Why? The chief reason, according to the prof., is that most students haven't read much, and ?if you haven't read much, when you set pen to paper yourself, you take things more slowly and apply a literal-minded logic, as you would in finding your way through a dark house.? (If only someone would just remove all the uncomfortable language from our greatest novels! Then?kids would read more and all would be well!) Yagoda is right. Bad writing today?at least the bad writing that I read?is not truncated but elongated, full of clunky and awkward expressions that are supposed to sound sophisticated but actually sound goofy. Want kids to write better stuff? Give them an issue of, say, the New Yorker, and tell them to read it cover to cover (tell them they'll be tested on a random article). Repeat.
?Liam Julian, Bernard Lee Schwartz Policy Fellow