Why People Can’t Write, and How To Fix That

January 27, 2022·45 min·3 clips

A student told Elizabeth Wardle she had never written to an audience — only to a rubric — and that admission reveals everything wrong with writing education.

Can the people around you write? Jason Pfeiffer opens with that familiar private suspicion, then follows how fast it turns into a public complaint about schools, adults, and younger generations. The anxiety has a paper trail. A Washington Post story says young people do not write as well as older generations, while a 2004 New York Times headline points the same worry at corporate adults. The episode uses that recurring complaint to get at an older habit: people mistake a teaching problem for a character problem. Elizabeth Wardle helps explain the mismatch. As the excerpt frames it, students were being asked to do something society had not always expected them to do. That should have led to better instruction. Often, it led to blame. The archives make the pattern feel almost too familiar. In 1883, a Massachusetts education gathering heard complaints about sentimentalism and weak schooling, not a clear account of how writing develops. A Boston Globe story from the next year covered educators pushing for better English while worrying that books were being softened for broad approval. Harvard tried its own fix, but its committee treated composition as little more than talking with a pen. That made writing sound absurdly easy, and made struggling writers look deficient instead of under-taught. By the end, Pfeiffer turns to novelty songs and 1960s memory, using pop culture to separate writing from good writing. The joke lands because the point is sharp. People remember the Beatles more readily than the stranger hits, and memory quietly edits out the messy middle. Maybe people are not simply getting worse at writing. Maybe we keep underestimating what writing asks of people, then blaming them for needing to learn it.

As heard by us

A history of why people keep worrying that the next generation cannot write.

Build for Tomorrow turns a familiar complaint into a broader argument: the fear that people cannot write is treated less as a fresh collapse than as an old pattern of misunderstanding.

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Why you'd press play

If bad emails make you wince, this takes a historical look at why complaints about writing keep resurfacing.

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