A Credible Beginning

Whether we call our courses "Effective Communication" or "Technical Writing" or "Practical Communication for Business," students know that this is an "English" course and they know that their experiences with English in the past have been discouraging. Successive English teachers have told them that their writing was substandard, referring to such mysterious features as misplaced modifiers, comma splices and awkward diction, none of which ever made much sense; they have had their writing covered with cryptic symbols (dangl, s-v, W.W.,//, awk, coh) which were never explained; they have been told to look for hidden symbols in endless poems about Death and for instances of the conflict between Man & Nature in a succession of boring stories. Now, finally, when they have enrolled in something that interests them--Broadcast Technology or Forestry or Computer Information Systems--here is English again with its inevitable frustration, humiliation and pointlessness.