Why Schools Need to Go Back to the Basics of Writing - Intellectual Takeout

Once upon a time in America’s schools, teachers were instructed to teach their students the basics of good composition. - Annie Holmquist 

According to Bernard Sheridan, a school superintendent in Massachusetts in 1917, these basics included:

• An absolute mastery of ‘the sentence idea.’
• Freedom from glaring grammatical mistakes.
• Correct spelling of all ordinary words.
• Unfailing use of the commonest marks of punctuation.
• Some evidence of attention to matters of sentence structure and to the choice of words.

One hundred years later, Americans are slowly waking up to the fact that these basics are no longer being taught...