To care about the state and quality of writing today is to scream into a void while knowing that the void does nothing but laugh. Of course gripes about writing standards are a timeless and rather trite pastime: there’s always a market for shouts about how the kids these days are inarticulate. Or about the slipping of standards. Or about how so much contemporary writing is clunky and hackneyed and uninspired. There’s always an old man, always a porch, and always a lawn where the neighborhood kids bark this week’s cliché, speak in punchlines, and repeat metaphors so drained of life that you don’t even recognize them as metaphors.
What’s undeniable, however, is that there’s been a change in writing instruction. This is a change for which the evidence and the results are clear, but any discussion about the subject comes suspiciously close to snipes about language. To talk about writing instruction and its shortcoming is to be, almost certainly, muddled in a debate about style or taste or even authority. But the truth is that hardly anyone who studies how language shifts by swings and whims is troubled by the newest fashions in contemporary use. The frustration isn’t with the kids on the lawn; it is the mentality and standards and methods used to teach those kids that triggers the frustration.
And that’s true even though writing has always been a tricky subject to teach, as even great stylists are unable to explain what we might call the spooky elements that make some sentences soar and others sink. There’s no directory of good writing techniques, or surefire rules to follow, just as nobody can give you the correct order of musical notes to create a melody. Any list of the typical absolutes in contemporary writing instruction—shun adverbs, loathe the passive voice, cut latinate words, use short sentences—has the character of, at best, limiting the threat of mistakes because it removes so many tools. If you’re only permitted one note on the piano, perhaps it’s a little easier to keep it tuned. So the typical writer today ends up with a pen and paper and a very narrow range of expressions: nothing beyond what can be stated with short sentences and short words and short, crisp thoughts. This is the ethos of the contemporary writing seminar, or most communication classes, even though any template that promises to induce good prose will also shove away any potential for expansive or artful prose—it is the realm of instructions, manuals, blueprints, and checklists. Where all sentences are trapped between guardrails. Where the purpose of writing instruction is to prevent errors. Where the writer begins every sentence with nothing more than thoughts of what to avoid.