When I was at school and university I had a great love for words and the English language. I took part in debating; I was always very good at spelling; I cursed in silent rage whenever the language was abused in one way or another. I enjoyed writing just as much as I do now. But right throughout my secondary and tertiary education I took maths and science subjects, instead of English, as much as I could. For the English that I was taught was not really English at all. It was about reading a text, trying to guess how the marker would interpret it, and writing accordingly. English is taught in completely the wrong way in our schools.
The emphasis is never on how well something is written. It can flow well, it can have entirely grammatical sentences, it can be written in an entertaining style, and a style that matches the topic of discussion. But students are not taught that these are positive features.
They are taught about similes, metaphors and hyperbole, but they are not taught to use these devices only when it is appropriate for both the context and the writing style.
They know of alliteration, assonance and onomatopoeia, but with no idea that too much of any of these ruins a document and distracts the reader from the main points and lessens the impact of the document in question.
They are taught about plot and characterisation, as if those were the be all and end all and the prerequisite of any novel, and totally overlooking that some very ordinary books have both and some exceptional ones have only characterisation - The Pillars of the Earth and David Copperfield, respectively, being examples.
Students can analyse a piece of writing to death. But if you were to ask them whether something was well-written, whether it was good or whether they would recommend it, and why, you would draw a blank. After 13 years of schooling, and five years studying English specifically, many of our best and brightest still don't even know how to tell whether a piece of writing is good or bad, let alone write something good themselves.
People wonder why it is that so many young people have so little apprecation of books, and are so bad at writing. Academics and employers alike bemoan the inability of school leavers to write clearly and I suspect that I know why this is.
Students are not taught of linguistics, grammar, spelling or punctuation (in order of importance). The emphasis is on such holistic reading of prose that the actual sentences that make it up are overlooked. Clunky writing is not bad writing, by this measure, because it is the overall message that is important.
Well, rubbish to that. If your writing is unclear and I need to read it three times and then can only guess at what you were trying to say, it is badly written. The basic building blocks may come very easily once they are learned, but the learning is neither easy nor fast. Knowing about metaphor is all well and good, but before you can master that you need to have mastered the previous few steps, which too many people haven't. If you write with poor spelling, with commas and apostrophes missing, with sentences contructed so that they make no sense or mean the opposite of what you had intended to say, then what I notice will be neither the topic nor the clever little devices that you use. I will be so keen to get to the end of your document that I will notice neither, I will only be struggling in vain to work out what it was that you were trying to say.
I did not study English in my last year at school and studied it in my second to last year only under duress. I don't think that I gained anything at all from that last year of study, and there are two reasons for this. The first is that English, as studied at school, is entirely about analysis. The only writing that is normally required is of a fairly dull and formal type, and is largely about what someone else has written. Even where creativity is allowed, there are still rules that must be followed and conventions that must be obeyed, even where these can only hinder both the writer and the writing. A convention followed is a good thing, even where it achieves nothing, and a convention ignored is a bad thing, even when it would hinder.
But the second reason is by far the more important. It is that writing is not about the writing at all. Writing is nothing more than getting abstract thoughts onto a piece of paper. The clearer the thought, the crisper the prose. What is not in the brain cannot get onto a page. A writer who can think something through clearly and logically, and from all possible angles, will be able to verbalise those thoughts and, in turn, write them down and communicate them to others.
People who write good sketches of others are all good writers. But they are even better observers. They see things with the conscious mind that other people take on only subconsciously, then they stop to think about why what they have observed was significant. And once they have done this, once the mind can map out for itself what was seen, the words flow and the communication of what has been observed is assured. Where, for any reason, the thinking is murky, where it is based on emotion and intuition rather than on reason, the writing will be muddled and unclear, no matter how talented the writer.
I am a reader, and flatter myself that I am also a writer. It troubles me that in four years of secondary school English (and by no means a bad school, either) I not only learnt more that helps me to write in English from mathematics (because of the necessary logical thought processes) and Japanese (because of thinking about the structure of language and sentences), but I read not a single book, nor even a writer, that I have read since, would read for pleasure or would recommend to others. I was not taught to love literature, for the simple reason that literature was all but absent. I could tell you that the books I read were all good, in that they had plenty of literary features that we could conveniently write about in our exams, but as good as they were I didn't like a single one of them.
Students need to know grammar. They need to know some fancy words, and to know when not to use them. They need to be able to think at least as clearly as they are being expected to write. They need to know about punctuation. They need to know what all the words that are part of their lexicon mean. And once they know how words are turned into sentences and sentences into paragraphs. It is only at that point that they can write essays.
Once they know all these things, they know how to write in such a way that they can be understood. Only then can more complicated things be any use to them. And those things will indeed be useful at that stage, because they will know enough to analyse not only the literary device, but the context in which it occurs, and decide from that whether the literary devices of which their teachers are so keen will take away from the rest of the writing, and thereby detract from the message rather than adding to it.
It may be that it is necessary to be able to write before one can analyse, or analyse before one can write, I'm not certain. Maybe it's different for different people. What's not in doubt is that the learning needs to be done.
The English in our schools may have some purpose. Analysis of texts and movies is fine: even if it is not useful in a practical sense, abstract reasoning is a very useful skill to have, and the more it is taught the better. In this sense the English teachers are on the right track. But the same teachers have an opportunity to teach people how to think clearly, and are not taking it. As long as the basics are not done first - and they're not - people will leave our schools ill equipped to read, and even less equipped to write.