Communication's the name of the game

Almost everyone in India, not just students, needs to attend a course on writing skills.

Earlier this week I was at a workshop at Bombay University. It was organised by the indefatigable Padma Prakash, formerly of the Economic and Political Weekly and now of the Bombay University.

It was held to explain the basics of writing to budding social scientists. Most of those who attended the workshop were PhD or MPhil students who'd soon be writing their dissertations.

When my turn came to speak, I did my usual number. One, keep each sentence down to around 15 words. Two, make sure you avoid compound sentences like a plague. If these two rules were followed, I said, most of the problems would vanish.

There is a third rule as well: be very clear and sure as to what you want to say. This doesn't sound as if it has anything to do with writing. But it does, more than anyone realises.

The truth is that it is not just students who need training in writing. Almost everyone in India does. Whether it be judges or bureaucrats or corporate types, everyone should be made to attend a course on writing skills.

This is because for the last 30 years, 99 per cent of educated Indians have not been taught how to write. The reason is the CBSE system of examination.

Sometime in the early 1970s, the CBSE decided that English writing skills were not important at all. So, the old British practice of forcing everyone to write essays was given up.

Instead, came the short answer format where around 250 words were all that were required in an answer. Being good copycats, the state boards did the same. By the 1980s, the race to the bottom had begun in earnest. The answers became even shorter.

But one board alone resisted this trend: the ISC Board. The result of this was explained to me a few months ago by a lecturer at a Delhi University college.

No

sooner than the first tutorial is handed in, she said, she could tell whether it was a CBSE student or ISC student. The latter almost always wrote better than the former.

This general decline in essay writing abilities has been accompanied by another affliction: the failure to teach grammar. The main casualties are the article and the preposition. It is virtually impossible to find an Indian today who knows how to use 'a' or 'the'. The other rules of grammar don't even begin to get a look-in.

I have no idea what has happened in other social sciences. But in economics an extraordinary supply-demand gap has developed. Most of those who know economics don't know how to write -- several honourable exceptions apart -- and those who know how to write don't know any economics. The number of who know both is rapidly tending to zero.

So, much of what emerges, for example as 'research', is barely intelligible. I am referring to just simple, grammatically correct prose. The chalta hai has permeated here as well.

As a result, the demand for good copy editors has gone through the roof but the supply is shrinking. It is nearly impossible to find good copy editors, whether it is for economics or for anything else.

One would have expected the pecuniary rewards to good copy editors to have gone up massively. But they haven't because publishers, who set the benchmark rates, have conspired to keep the rate down. In any case, the reading public, which also isn't very good at English, has stopped caring.

This has led to another problem. Those who write on topics in social sciences have begun to think that they only have to put down the words and that someone else will clean up for them.

They have forgotten that if you can't write properly, you can't think properly either. The decay has been a long-term one, so it will take time to reverse, provided the CBSE can rectify its error. In the meantime, remedies such as the workshop I attended have to be adopted.