Language and SSTLS (from early October)

Super Sad True Love Story blog post

I’d like to share my opinion about grammar as a college requirement. As we all know, the SUNY system requires us to take an obscene number of general education classes (CCCs), such as history, social sciences, math, and arts. While some of these classes can be interesting or useful to our respective majors, the majority of them are not.

I admit that I’m biased, because I’m an English major, but I believe that students of all majors would benefit from a basic grammar class taken in freshman year. No matter what field of study a student goes into, there are always writing assignments: lab reports, essays, research proposals, emails, press releases or cutlines. Since many grade schools fail to impart a basic understanding of how to write complete and comprehensible sentences (or students simply forget over the years) a refresher course would prepare them for college and the professional world.

In my time at Fredonia, I’ve seen horrible things done to grammar and lack of rudimentary written communication skills. This could, in my opinion, be fixed by adding a grammar requirement in place of one of the more irrelevant CCCs. Requiring a grammar class would relieve professors of the burden of receiving convoluted essays and emails, and also serve students well throughout their lives by preparing them for the real world in which clear and grammatically correct communication is a valued skill.

I bring this up on our blog in relation to Super Sad True Love Story, the futuristic tale of illiterate America. In the novel, privacy and literacy are things of the past. Lenny is mocked for possessing books, and cautioned not to let Joshie know of his collections for fear of losing his job. Many people he encounters are so involved in apparat data streams that they forget how to read full sentences. The shortened words and images take over literature.

The decline of language, and specifically grammar usage, in the past few centuries is obvious. Letters written to family members in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were much more formal then even the most professional letters of our century. Handwritten letters or long phone conversations are being replaced by internet and texting abbreviations—jk, idk, and lol, for example— that gain more popularity as the decade advances. Changes in twenty-first century communication alone are huge; a hundred or two more years and our society could well mirror Shteyngart’s portrayal.

This only reinforces a need for the humanities, especially reading and writing. I find that many people of my generation have a foggier grasp on the concept of grammar than do our older relatives. This, in my opinion, should be reversed by way of the education system. Instead of requiring many classes which have no practical application, a basic grammar class could stave off the situation presented in Super Sad True Love Story. I’m interested to hear other opinions about this, so please let me know why you agree or disagree that grammar should be a CCC.