Thanks, Marcy! I like this line from Sartwell's piece:
"Today's educational establishment is making actual illiteracy look good, like
an act of humanity and rebellion. Writing, which might nurture and give shape to
thought, is instead being used to pound it into a powder and then reconstitute
it into gruel."
While I would hope (short of senility) never to lapse into a (William) Safirian
mode of self-righteous pronouncements and prescriptions about language use, I
have to say that I found Sartwell's turn of phrase here engaging.
Graham
Marcy Bauman wrote:
> This article URL was posted to another list I'm on where people are also
> discussing the Indiana decision to score essays with computers. My
> favorite part of this piece is:
>
> "I am not particularly concerned about the youth of today, and if the world
> goes to hell I don''t really care. But I do care about coming to the middle
> of a semester and reading 35 5-page papers that seem to have been written
> by boulders."
>
> Marcy
>
> ---------- Forwarded Message ----------
> Date: Friday, May 28, 2004 2:54 PM -0600
> From: Nick Carbone <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask], [log in to unmask]
> Subject: [techrhet] FW: lobotomized school of writing
>
> Christopher Sartwell wrote a piece in the LA Times Op. Ed. pages that slams
> computerized grading and 5 para theme.
>
> [snip]
>
> http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/opinion/la-oe-sartwell20may20,1,153
> 7602.story
>
> Here's the version from Sartwell's own WWW site:
> http://www.crispinsartwell.com/mechwrite.htm
>
> You'll note the Times made some family newspaper edits to Sartwell's
> original.
>
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> Media Consultant
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> University of Michigan
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--
***************************
Graham Smart
Assistant Professor
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
College of Letters and Science
Department of English
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