Yesterday the Pope Center released a paper by retired English professor Nan Miller that explains why it’s now common to find college students and even graduates who write poorly. The paper is available here.
The villains of the piece are the “composition theorists” who who hijacked an important course back in the 1980s and now dominate writing classes with their strange notions about group work, holistic grading, the unimportance of conventions on grammar, usage, and punctuation, and the need to keep great literature out.