Feeling Inarticulate? Help Is on the Way

It is all too true that Americans have become inarticulate, at least in some respects. Television, families without much parental interaction with children and schools more interested in socializing kids than instructing them have combined to reduce the expressive refinements of, say, 100 years ago. Then, young people were trained to write with a legible hand and high-school students studied “logic and rhetoric.” Ordinary people wrote each other graceful letters. Then, also,
conversation was regarded as a serious domestic art.

But loss of that relatively gentle and reasoned eloquence began a couple of generations ago; it is hardly new. Take humor. While a joke by Mark Twain might require several minutes to read or tell, the effect of television programs such as Laugh-In in the late 1960s and nearly all situation comedies and stand-up comics since then has been to make us take
our amusement now as we take our food: fast.

The difference is partly a matter of style, however. We are less formal now and more direct. Our reading is more specialized, but we do read more books, not fewer, according to the American Booksellers Association. Politeness has declined; sincerity probably has gained. The humor is more biting, but it surely is just as funny. People make up new words and import whole new vocabularies from the worlds of entertainment or high technology, but that is typical of the development of American English; indeed, it is its strength. Our language is flexible, juicy and practical. The whole world wants to speak it.

More importantly, to the extent Americans really are less articulate–less sequential in thought and expression, less reasoned and deliberate–help is on the way. New technology is challenging the cultural trends of the past 40 years by facilitating clearer writing and by undercutting the dominance of centralized mass communications and education.

To understand what is happening we need to recognize that “inarticulateness” is more a function of miseducation than a lack of education. The average American has completed more years of schooling than ever before, with 80.2 percent having been graduated from high school, according to the Census Bureau, and 21.9 percent having at least a bachelor’s degree from college. Unfortunately, as we also know, what students are learning is often more trivial and unchallenging than ever before, and students at the higher levels try to hide their ignorance under a blanket of obscure, pseudoscientific jargon. This, they must suppose, makes bad writing and speaking a professional advantage. For example, neither citizen nor practicing politician can follow the writings of many academic “political scientists”–they’re not meant to be understood in the real world. Many bureaucrats, for another case, are so apt to make cloudy expression their first line of defense that they find they cannot speak and write plainly even when it is in their interest.

But advocates of clear language have a new ally in technology. Take the word processor. In the early 1980s, then-Secretary of Commerce Malcolm Baldrige Jr. launched a campaign against sloppy writing and jargon in government communications. President Reagan had Baldrige’s efforts implemented throughout his administration and writing really did improve. Bureaucratese was translated into English prose, and poor spelling and incorrect sentence structure were purged.

Baldrige’s emphasis on stricter writing standards might have met with only marginal success, however, had the same period (the 1980s) not seen the rapid spread of new personal office computers that allowed correspondents to make revisions easily and even showed them how to correct spelling and grammatical errors. The phenomenon was experienced in many fields–witness journalism. People may not be learning to write well in school–and have not done so since at least World War II—but they are now being self-taught on their office personal computers.

In the 1990s, the computer revolution is reaching the home. Of the 50 million personal computers purchased during the past two years, two-thirds went into homes. The Internet, with about 5 million participants and growing by 24 percent a month, is chiefly a home-based activity. Penmanship might be in decline, but writing qualiliy overall is improvingg as people make use of the nearly ubiquitous computer.

It is a mistake to confuse the “chat” one sees on computer forums for the longer letters posted there. Chat is as casual and insignificant as the term implies. If you look in, say, on National Review’s “Town Hall,” however, you also will see careful essays that explore a single idea at length and revive the tradition of belles lettres.

The writing is not identical to the epistolary prose of yore, of course. For one thing, the ability to post a letter and have it received at once means that exchanges can take place more frequently, which leads to many brief responses to individual points once a correspondence has begun. But, like old-fashioned letters, there are no time constraints. You can receive a message at midnight and answer it the next morning or a month later.

On the other hand, on-line writers in the myriad forums found on computers today realize that they may be composing for large audiences. The Internet is an efficient and inexpensive way of gathering audiences with similar interests and letting them interact. A professor at some tiny college in the hinterlands suddenly has the company he wants to discuss theology, taxes or butterflies. He writes, then, for a real audience, not the largely bogus professional journals that keep the tenure system going. The Internet audiences, moreover, are interested in the subject matter, not in elaborate style, so clear expression is

One of the most prolific users of the Internet is my colleague, George Gilder, a writer on high-technology subjects who finds his work for the Discovery Institute or Forbes ASAP given wide secondary distribution on-line. “I find I can’t answer all the mail I get from the post office, but I work through literally hundreds of e-mail messages a day,” he says. “I’ve met many fascinating and intelligent people [through computer services] whom I wouldn’t have encountered otherwise. Then, when I’m on the road, they have a way of showing up in person. Real friendships develop.”

What has happened at the office and, now, at home is just hitting the field of education, though not in the way people might expect. Already, literally millions of personal computers have been installed in public and private schools. Some 35 percent of public primary and high schools now are connected to Internet . But real use is limited because of failure to deploy the computer outside specially designated “computer labs,” so only about 3 percent of rooms in which teaching takes place have computers, and an even tinier share of students have access to them.

Lewis Perelman, author of School’s Out, holds that the real learning revolution for students is going to begin at home, not in the bureaucratic, overly cautious confines of schools. Indeed, parents dissatisfied with schools are driving the market for new computer instructional products. The computer, properly networked, can offer a “virtual school” of distance learning, software and Internet options. It can give well-motivated kids a way to enrich what they learn in school or even substitute for it. Virtual schooling is sure to spur the already large (500,000 family) home-schooling movement, but in the end it also is likely to force school systems to revise their whole mission. Teachers henceforth may serve less to “teach” students than to assist and guide them, whether in face-to-face meetings in a more intermittent pattern or through video conferences.

Even unmotivated students are likely to react better to a private process that monitors their work with a real tutor but, by keeping its pace to theirs, does not embarrass them if they work more slowly than other students. Indeed, new software learning programs are at pains to reinforce each step of progress and rekindle the desire to learn, which too often is extinguished by schooling. The result, as at the office, will be a more literate—and articulate—citizen.

Within three years if Congress deregulates telecommunications, and within eight years or so if it does not, homes will be equipped with what Gilder calls the “teleputer” A combination of television, video, telephone and computer services, it will be interactive and simple to use. Through it, even more reference materials–entire libraries of text as well as film–will be open to the student. More text means more opportunity to explore sequential thought and to use it.

The television screen is fine for video, but it provides only 72 dots per inch for resolution and contrast, com- pared with laser-printer sharpness of 300 dots per inch. The teleputer will start at about 278 dots per inch and soon reach laser-printer quality. Early units may be large, but eventually flat-screen teleputers weighing about three pounds will allow the student to carry huge libraries and guides around as easily as a ring-binder notebook now is toted. Like the first television, the early teleputers will be costly, but like the television, they will become uni- versal and cheap. The teleputer will rescue the inner-city child as well as the child of the Wyoming rancher.

By reinforcing curiosity and rewarding progress, the teleputer will help the student master willingly subjects that schools have made dreary. It will be a ready resource for writing papers or preparing presentations. It will introduce students to great thinkers and to peers in other towns and countries.

The teleputer will not necessarily make the citizens of the future more virtuous. But it will make them more knowledgeable and intellectually adventuresome. It will encourage them to hone those special interests and skills that distinguish them as individuals and thus render them less vulnerable to the the banality usually found on television. Seated like cavemen, but in front of a TV, today’s youth are viscerally wired to scenes of violence and sex, struck dumb and numb. Given a whole world of tutors through the teleputer – more than the most fortunate Renaissance scholars could imagine — children will have a better chance to become civilized human beings.

In the course, they also will become more “articulate.”