Word: marius
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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ACCORDING TO Expository Writing Director Richard Marius, there is a serious problem with undergraduate writing at Harvard. He pronounces his own program blameless, however, and instead faults the undergraduates themselves and the University at large...
...RICHARD MARIUS, director of the Expository Writing Program, offered some keen analysis of student writing in a recently released 20-plus-page report. It's worth remarking, though, that making assessments is only one of the responsibilities of the person most responsible for writing instruction here. If student writing is as poor as Marius evidently believes, the program he heads deserves more scrutiny than his report suggests...
...Marius' analysis is interesting even though he often lapses into banal generalities of the kind he criticizes in students' writing. He says at one point (and we apologize to Marius for using a lengthy quotation, a technique to which the report objects): "Our students have an almost eerie ability to identify rock groups on hearing a few bars of the music. They know much about sports. They can make exquisite discriminations about the relative merits of various commercials on TV." We appreciate his tact; after all, Marius might simply have called us stupid...
Nonetheless, it seems odd--and more than a little self-serving--for the director of Expository Writing to criticize undergraduate writing in the same report that absolves him of any responsibility in the matter. One would hope that Marius would turn a critical eye on his own program, in which the quality of instruction varies enormously among classes. Many of Marius' criticisms have to do with difficulties of style of a kind which the semester-long course he oversees should be able to address. So we conclude that your points are valid, Mr. Marius. We only hope you do something...
...Most students at Harvard use the most commonsentence forms again and again," Marius writes."They often shun active verbs and in consequenceproduce writing that lies inert on the page...