Or at least not with substance or grammatical structure, according to a Washington Post opinion piece. It bashes the Common Core structure and wants to focus more on sentence structure. A turn back to basics, they say. I can’t argue. That is a step. Trying to teach students who to write sentences with style is difficult when they are making mistakes I learned in grammar school. Maybe there is a need to have the old fashioned elderly English teacher with glasses and a ruler hovering over every sentence. There is too much writing distraction today – Americans have certainly let text style infiltrate basic writing skills.
But this is just the start. More reading, which is easier said than done. It is the best approach, in my opinion, and one that is impossible to see followed through at home unless parents are willing to put in the effort with their children.
There is also that pesky five-paragraph essay, which too may teachers and professors feel is gospel. In fact, they have lost the whole point of what that structure was supposed to represent, and is not taught properly in most cases, in my opinion. Regardless, that is another blog post for another day.
