University Writing Center

Tidbits

• . . . the more they stay the same

  A great outcry has been made lately, on every side, about the inability of the students admitted to Harvard College to write English clearly and correctly. The schools are to-day paying more attention to composition than they did twenty or thirty years ago; and yet, notwithstanding this increased study and practice, the writing of schoolboys has been growing steadily worse.

  – “The English Question,” James Jay Greenough Atlantic Monthly, May 1893