Everyone knows that today’s college students cannot write, but few seem willing to admit that the professors who denounce them are doing much better. Patricia Nelson Limerick
Some two years ago, the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE) expressed concern that graduates from middle level and higher education institutions haven’t mastered the art of communication.
From the survey, 49.1% of the respondent enterprises identified effective communication to be the most lacking social skills in job applicants, a 2023 report, dubbed the Skills Needs Survey report by the Federation of Kenya Employers (FKE),
At the core of communication is the need for clarity, simplicity, and coherence in the communication or articulation of the ideas, thoughts and values—which people act on to make things to work.
Why should nearly a half of the respondents complain that job applicants falter on this very basic, but critical skill?
What is the problem? The prospective employees have had long years of schooling.
There are several reasons for this.
First, students at the universities are overly exposed to books written by academics. The writing is stuffy, rigid and full of jargon.
Newly admitted students in institutions of higher education in the USA to undertake what they call Freshman Composition writing course. The course focuses on improving students’ abilities to think in speech and on paper. The course is more about rhetoric, the art of persuasion in writing and speaking.
Most of the curriculum resources in this course are writings by great thinkers and public intellectuals who wrote to address burning issues of their days in popular language. Included are speeches, treatises, letters, reports, poems, novels, plays.
The materials are a study in clarity, simplicity, and coherence. They always look at issues in the light of enduring values and principles of civilization. The mind and heart of the reader uplifted.
The books are without the scholarship that we associate with scholarly works.
The students are sometimes confused about the different type of writing is Professors demand from them.
“You are telling us not to write long, dull sentences, but most of our assigned reading list is full of long, dull sentence,” Patricia Nelson Limerick, a Professor of History remembers asking in frustration in a 1993 article Dancing with Professors: The Trouble with Academic Prose, in the New York Times Book review.
“As this student was beginning to recognise, when professors undertake to appraise and improve student writing, the blind are leading the blind. It is in truth, difficult to persuade students to write well when they find so few good examples in their assigned reading,” Limerick notes.
So, part of the problem of faltering communication in speech and writing among students, is traceable to the academic writing they are exposed to in college. Abstract words, wordy sentences, musty paragraphs, saying nothing. Yet the study of English gramma is the study of the speech habits of accomplished speakers and writers. Clearly, academic writing is not one the best example of communication—the seamless sharing of information, feelings, attitudes and values.
The other reason for the halting manner of communication is the overdependence on textbooks in the years of basic education.
While textbooks in high school don’t have the academic language associated with the reading list on university courses, it lacks the simplicity, clarity and lucidity in writing that employers want.
There is nothing wrong with textbooks. They bring together, in a sequential manner, the content that ought to be learned to equip the students with the mental, physical and moral orientations essential for the existence of the nation or society.
However, the textbook is a means to an end. The textbooks cannot optimally meet that end.
“Most textbooks present students with a highly simplified view of reality and practically little or no insight into the methods by which the information has been gathered and facts distilled,” Ernest L Boyer notes in his book, High School: A Report on Secondary Education in America.
Perhaps, the only subject where students are exposed to writing style of the kind recommended by employers is Literature in English and Fasihi ya Kiswahili. Students meet novels, plays, poetry, and passages in Comprehension exercises in both languages that were not written for students. The books in question are about six in total which ought to be read intensively in Forms three and four.
With this exception, all that students read or study are textbooks purely for information on prescribed syllabus.
The English language syllabi under the 8.4.4 system of education that is coming to a close recommends that schools expose learners to extensive reading of fictional and nonfictional works. The 8.4.4 English syllabus gives guidelines to this effect.
Regrettably, the period, under the school hours in the Basic Education Regulations, 2015, could use to undertake extensive reading of books and deepening their knowledge of other subjects have been taken up by teachers who teach extra hours. The average three hours beyond the six hours of official teaching or engagement with learners deny them the opportunity to volitionally read such books.
There is a need for school systems to recommend books of outstanding literary value for purposes of extensive reading throughout the 12 years of learning. It is the books—great fictional and nonfictional works—that will cultivate the communication skills the world wants of the students. Edward Gibbon, the English historian says, the use of reading is to aid us in reading. The reading of books, not academically oriented books, important as they are.
In her book, The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education, An American Historian of Education, Dianne Ravitch says that an English language curriculum, without literature—real, named books of lasting importance—is no English curriculum at all.
Real, an education where students don’t undertake extensive reading is a scam. Schools subvert the great aims of education when they create a teaching and learning environment that leaves no room for students to undertake extensive reading. School leaders and teachers ought to take this as part of their obligation to the young generation: to throw at the feet of these students the cultural and intellectual heritage of mankind—across time and civilizations—in the school library.
The third reason why there is poor communication skills is that generally speaking, employers have never been strict on demonstrating a bias for excellent communication—speaking and writing—upon recruitment. They insist more on technical skills. The possession of the technical skill blinds the employer to whatever other skills which are critical to the operations of the company.
The reservations about poor communication skills amounts to grumbling. Employers whine about poor communication but they don’t invest in improving the communication skills of, not just young employees, but also staff in middle level and strategic positions of the companies. They also tolerate mediocre writing. Clearly, they don’t insist on excellent writing done that circulate within the companies. Neither do they care about the subtlety in the communications that go out of the company. If they do, the standards are demonstrably low.
Companies in the West invest in communication—in writing and speaking. They spend millions training their staff not just on the technical skills core to their companies, but also on communication, management and other skills.
Evidence of investment in training of staff on communication is demonstrated through a number of formats. Quality of the speeches they prepare for their top leaders for various for a; reports, letters, memos. Most of these writings are equal to the models of writing that professors of composition and rhetoric use in teaching Freshers in American Universities.
The leadership also communicated equally high standards of writing, of document preparation. Be it speech, a letter, report, memos—artistry is the DNA of writing in all these documents.
Those given assignments to prepare appropriate speeches, letters, reports know the standards. The culture. They went training over and above the education they had in college.
FKF must also support reading culture in their employees by establishing libraries in their companies.
By Kennedy Buhere
Buhere is a Communication Specialist.
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