I received this interesting response from a reader who found my post on the poor writing ability of young Americans to be accurate.

Dear Mr. Leef,
I enjoyed your discussion regarding the lack of writing skills for contemporary college students. I am the parent of two teenagers and believe I have some insight.
My oldest is a freshman at a midwestern state university. She is a pre-med major and a scholarship athlete, carries a 3.9 GPA, and had a 4.0 GPA at her public high school . . .
. . . and she can’t write a lick!
I attribute this to two things: First, she learned to read and write in school districts employing the utterly nonsensical “whole word” reading system, meaning that the kid has no knowledge whatsoever of root words, phonics, or the general mechanics of the English language. At the time, I argued vehemently against the imposition of this methodology upon her (to no avail), and eventually was reduced to attempting to supplement her schooling with phonetic workbooks, activities, etc. I feel like i did the best I could, but I just couldn’t overcome the damage done. Second, following our move west during her middle school years, she was proctored by the kind of teachers you are talking about — teachers who preferred multiple choice tests to assigning (and grading) essays. Moreover, on those rare occasions when teachers did assign essays, their grading of the same was so poor and slip-shod that — much to my daughter’s chagrin — I invariably “re-graded” them and made her sit and listen while I explained what was wrong — and why I didn’t care what her grade was. Of course, my articulation of the standard rules of written English fell largely on deaf ears — at least in part because she didn’t have a fundamental understanding of the mechanics of writing.
The bottom line is that during her K-12 years a lot of emphasis was placed on having “fun” with reading and writing, but almost none on mastering the basics of written communication.
Fortunately, she took a writing class at the local junior college during her senior year of high school, and was assigned a young writing instructor who recognized her deficiencies and undertook to correct them by insisting this high school senior understand, learn and comply with rules of writing she should have had drilled into her by the 6th grade. It has made a big difference in her ability to communicate in writing, but suffice to say I do not ever expect to see any sort of quality prose flow from her pen.
As I said, she is a freshman pre-med major and (sadly) has already competed her Humanities requirements. At this point, I can only hope she’ll move beyond the bumper-sticker-intellect-texting level she is at now and get to the point where she can string together sentences well enough to be able to communicate with her staff and patients on a superficial level.
Paul S. Phillips
Gillette, Wyo.