Dissident teacher on affluent school districts

I cannot stress this enough: wealthy AP students with professional parents living in safe neighborhoods have poor command of grammar, small vocabularies, and a strong proclivity to try to hide all of that by using the passive voice and the thesaurus . . .

Dissident Teacher: Your kids aren’t learning. At all.

This is what we experienced in our affluent school district, except for the passive voice and thesaurus part. I don’t remember seeing that.

I certainly don’t see over-use of passive voice (or thesaurus) in the first-gen students I teach in a local college. Just the opposite. Writing textbooks and college websites universally caution against using the passive voice, but I see so little PV in my students’ writing that I teach lessons on how to construct it¹ and when to use it.

Remember that old saw about learning to follow the rules before you can break them? Usually applied to painting? First you learn to paint realism, then you graduate to abstraction. That was the idea.

For my students, it’s the opposite. They have to start using passive voice before it’s going to make sense for anyone to tell them to stop using so much of it.

Pop quiz: Winston Churchill uses the passive voice

---

^{1. In fact, my students all know how to construct passive voice. What they need is practice turning longer active-voice sentences into passive constructions.↩}

re: diminishing expectations…

I’ve just read Katharine’s A diminishing infection of casual speech by edited prose?. (For what it’s worth, my answer is yes).

Reminds me of a change I’ve seen.

I never took a college writing course myself, but I was sufficiently alert to understand that the Big Flaw in student writing, in those days, was overuse of big words and passive voice.

Later on, in graduate school, my friend Val told me that her most mortifying experience as an undergraduate had been using a thesaurus to look up and replace every word in a paper with a bigger, more important word, then having her professor tell her that using a thesaurus to look up and replace every word with a bigger one was a terrible way to write. She was crushed.

When I returned to teaching freshman writing a few years ago, I found that contemporary textbooks were just as concerned with big word-mongering and excessive passive voice as they had been in my day. Any composition handbook worth its salt seemed to include a lengthy section on editing your paper to make it sound more like a human wrote it.

So I expected to address the issue with my students …. and then it never came up. No one in my classes was using passive voice, and no one was looking up big words in the thesaurus. Just the opposite. My students erred on the side of being too colloquial and still do.

I don’t know why.

Too much memoir writing in K-12?

Too little reading of sophisticated literary prose?

It’s a mystery to me because I can’t imagine that either Val or I had read much literary prose when we went to college….yet somehow we knew that college professors used big words and passive voice, so we figured we should, too.

Why was that?

And why are things different today?