The Write Stuff

Stanley Fish is alarmed:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?

He goes on to suggest a solution, but I'm more interested in the problem. It's yet another "what's the matter with kids today?" issues.

I remember hearing my generation couldn't write a sentence to save our lives. So how long has this been going on? To put it another way, what was the last generation that actually could write? Once we figure that out, let's just teach 'em today how we taught 'em then.