Carl Remick wrote:
> >Don't you think that college educations in the liberal arts at least help
> >teach students how to write more or less comprehensible English prose?
> >--jks
>
> Sure enough. But the first thing you learn in public relations writing is
> to junk acceptable English and turn it into the incantatory nonsense of
> bizspeak.
I catch a plane in a little over an hour so this has to be quick and off the top of my head. In Johnson's *Rasselas* his central characters meet an astronomer who is looking for a successor to carry out his essential task of causing the sun to rise each morning and set each evening. For a little over a century college english departments (and practically everyone else) have sailed merrily along that those who can write have learned to do so from their writing classes and that those who can't write simply are less intelligent or less diligent or what have you.
There is a very real possibility that this belief is as utterly unfounded as is the astronmer's belief that he causes the sun to rise.
Anyone who wishes to explore this for him/herself should begin what is actually a pretty thorny question with Patricia Dunn, *LEARNING REABLED: THE LEARNING DISABILITY CONTROVERSY AND COMPOSITION STUDIES, Boynton/Cook Heinemann).
Crudely put: There exist a huge number of people with really excellent command of English whose writing will never show that. There is a glitch between brain and fingers. *Not* learning disabled but more the actual norm *among intelligent people.* Writing skill is an aberration, not something that any method can teach, and it has no relationship to intelligence (whatever intelligence is).
Carrol