Undergrad. English worries Oxford

Press, 22 June 1989, Page 24

Undergrad. English worries Oxford

By

TONY VERDON

in London

The steady decline of written English among Oxford undergraduates has prompted senior aca-

demics to consider the introduction of remedial classes for students. The Rhodes Professor of American History at Oxford, Professor Jack Pole, blames the “collapse of good taste and a failure of nerve” in schools which, he says, believe that “any kind of mental effort inflicts damage on the brain of pupils.” He says in a paper on illiteracy among Oxford undergraduates that “with a schooling which offers them no encouragement to attach any particular value to fine but significant distinctions, grammatical precision, or even sentences rounded out with verbs, we can hardly blame our undergraduates for many of the solecisms which have aroused the alarm of the examiners.” The paper has been submitted to the university’s history faculty, and was published in “The

Times Higher Education Supplement.” Professor Pole also blames the media, and in particular newspapers, for perpetuating solecisms, such as the confusion of may with might in headlines. These become canonised into the language with repetition, he said.

Oxford dons were so concerned at the decline of standards, the professor said, that persistent offenders might have to be sent to a tutor for special classes. Most Oxford undergraduates were well groomed in writing elegant English. However, he was concerned at the decline in the ability of some students to frame an argument and express themselves accurately. An English don at Lady Margaret Hall, Dr Nicholas Shrimpton, said that although students learnt to write academic discourse, there was a movement towards being “ostentatiously obscure, selfconsciously and deliberately elaborate and unreadable.”