金融时报:让人捉急的写作能力

让人捉急的写作能力

一位美国名校MBA的教授布置了写作作业，没想到学生们竟纷纷跑到院长那儿哭诉：我们平时用电邮、Twitter和Facebook交流就够了，教授他这不是要人命吗？学生们的语法、标点和拼写能力堪称"凶残"，别提完整而有逻辑地表达了。这让人反思：家长们拼命让孩子学绘画、学外语，还不如让他们扎扎实实学好母语写作呢。

测试中可能遇到的词汇和知识：

memorandum [memə'rændəm] n.备忘，既要

prose [prəʊz] n.散文

rote [rəʊt] n.死记硬背

Paul Klee 德籍瑞士画家

Mandarin ['mænd(ə)rɪn] 汉语“满大人”的音译，即中国普通话

apostrophe [ə'pɒstrəfɪ] n.撇号

Does it matter if students can’t write? (745 words)

By Michael Skapinker, FT columnist on business, language and society

A few weeks ago I received an email from a US professor whose dean had reprimanded him for trying to teach his students how to write.

The professor, who has been teaching business and law students at some of America’s top universities for 50 years, told an MBA class that clear writing would be essential in their careers.

Each week in his class, they would compose a one-page memorandum, which he would read and mark. The memos would answer a simple question from their textbooks. “I wanted the assignment to be more about conveying their analyses than testing their ability to get the analyses right,” he said.

Were they grateful? “The students complained so vigorously to the dean that the dean urged me to stop.” The students said that in business today they did not need to know how to write. “Emails and tweets are the medium of exchange. So, they argued, the constant back-and-forth gives one an opportunity to correct misunderstandings caused by unclear thinking and writing.”

The dean insisted that the professor make the writing exercise voluntary. By the end of the term, only one student, a non-native English speaker, was submitting the assignments.

The professor’s worry about writing is widely shared. According to 2008 research, 46 per cent of first-year California state university students needed writing help.

The deficiency is not confined to undergraduates. A study published in 2009 in the journal Current Issues in Education found that a group of 97 US masters and doctoral students did no better in a diagnostic writing test than the typical college-bound high school senior.

Teachers at even the UK’s top universities say the same. David Abulafia, a Cambridge history professor, said in a talk this year: “People do not know how to write. Command of grammar, punctuation and spelling is atrocious.”

There was a need, Prof Abulafia said, to recover “an art (I shan’t call it a skill) that has been lost and has to be instilled in first-year undergraduates even at Oxford and Cambridge: the ability to write continuous prose, clearly, elegantly, concisely, setting out an argument”.

Is students’ writing really worse, or are professors imagining a golden age of literacy that never existed?

People have been complaining about writing for a while. “If your children are attending college, the chances are that when they graduate they will be unable to write ordinary, expository English with any real degree of structure and lucidity,” Newsweek magazine said in a famous essay called “Why Johnny can’t write”.

That was in 1975. The experts blamed “the simplistic spoken style of television”.

Today, Prof Abulafia says poor writing “may reflect a society in which fewer young people read and much of their informal writing consists of Twitter and Facebook messages”. He does, however, also worry about rote learning in schools and that pupils receive no reward in examinations for having read more widely. He adds that many more students are now sitting school-leaver A-level examinations, which means teachers and examiners have less time to spend on each candidate.

Whether poor writing is new or old, it is odd that it persists at a time when parents are vying to provide their children with any possible advantage, exposing them to Paul Klee at the age of four, as the New York Times recently reported, and teaching them to sing “Heads, shoulders, knees and toes” in Mandarin.

If there is such a shortage of competent writers, why aren’t ambitious parents rushing to make sure their kids can compose an elegant English essay, and why aren’t MBA students scrambling to do the same?

One possible answer is that there really isn’t much of a demand and that being a decent writer commands no premium in the job market. Are the US professor’s students right in thinking that Twitter, Facebook and text messaging are all they need?

I doubt it. There are still jobs where good writing matters. It is hard to see those law students stepping up to the bench without being able to render a literate judgment. And I can’t be the only customer who assumes that a banker who doesn’t know where an apostrophe goes is going to be equally careless with my money.

There’s a gap in the market and the smarter parents and students should get on to it. Good writing is far easier to master than Mandarin.

请根据你所读到的文章内容，完成以下自测题目：

1.Why the MBA professor's story is alarming?

A. He would read and mark the memorandums he assigned.

B. The students were ungrateful and even complained.

C. Clear writing is essential in those students' careers.

D. The dean insisted that the writing should be voluntary.

答案(1)

2.Are professors "imagining a golden age of literacy that never existed?"

A. No, students are doing worse and worse.

B. No, that problem did not exist until 1975.

C. Yes, there never was a time when students' writings were not atrocious.

D. The author does not answer it.

答案(2)

3.Narrowly speaking, it is what kind of writing that matters so much?

A. Argumentative writing.

B. Narrative prose.

C. Diagnostic writing.

D. Descriptive prose.

答案(3)

4.What is the most possible economic explanation to this phenomenon?

A. Being a decent writer commands no premium in the job market.

B. Twitter, Facebook and text messaging are economically superior.

C. Writing skill does not make much difference except for lawyers and bankers.

D. Parents find out that training children writing is too expensive.

答案(4)

* * *

(1) 答案：C.Clear writing is essential in those students' careers.

解释：这是最值得人们警醒和反思的地方，非常需要书写表达能力的MBA名校学生，竟然不会写作，也不愿练习。最后只有个母语非英语的学生交了作业。

(2) 答案：D.The author does not answer it.

解释：A不正确，教师们担忧学生写作能力，可有段时间了，至少在1975年Newsweek杂志还专门做了个报道。但1975并非一个转折点，所以B也不对。C在文中并未提到，因此作者并未回答。

你怎么看这个问题呢？

(3) 答案：A.Argumentative writing.

解释：这里所说的写作能力主要是指议论文写作，这是最能体现一个人的逻辑思维能力和清晰表达能力的，文中几次将写作重要性的时候，都是在说议论文。 比如开头MBA教授说写作是要锻炼他们conveying the analyses.再比如剑桥大学的Prof Abulafia强调了，the ability to write continuous prose, clearly, elegantly, concisely, setting out an argument. 而一些学生认为，推特这种方式可以很快的back-and-forth，讲的不清楚也可以马上补充和更正。

(4) 答案：A.Being a decent writer commands no premium in the job market.

解释：这是第三段的原话。所以最后一段作者写道 There’s a gap in the market and the smarter parents and students should get on to it.既然市场上写作能力与收入之间有条缺口，那聪明的家长和学生就该自己努力了。 BCD都是不对的。