“Dumbing Down” Revisited
By Mary Ellen Lepionka (© Mary Ellen Lepionka, 2005. All rights reserved.)

I have heard it often from academics, especially those attempting to write textbooks for undergraduates: “Dumbing Down.” This idiom, coined certainly prior to 1996, when it was featured in the Phyllis Schlafly Report, has entered the canon of discourse without much challenge. Traditionally, dumbing down is what happens when writers consciously produce less demanding content in the belief that readers lack sufficient vocabulary, comprehension, intelligence, or thinking skills to acquire it. The term is applied to everything from textbooks to language and civilization and means different things to different people. My issue is with academics who attribute dumbing down to textbook publishers as an excuse for their bad writing.

Bad writing is a source of the putative problem, listed in Schlafly’s Eagle Forum as a sign of decline in the rigor of higher education, along with the following well-known and much-discussed factors

· Loss of a common liberal arts curriculum, especially history and literature.
· Reduction in mandatory courses and prerequisite courses
· Reduction in the number of courses and course requirements
· Reduction in standards for granting degrees, devaluing diplomas
· Reduction in the length of the college year (by 48 days since 1914)
· Lack of writing and computational skills teaching and practice
· Grade inflation and a proliferation of remedial (“sub-freshman”) courses
· Increase in the number of courses on narrow and idiosyncratic subjects (“propaganda and entertainment masquerading as education”).

Other critics have identified the lowering of admission standards through affirmative action and institutional needs to increase enrollments (Hodges and Mechlenburg, 2003); dumbing down of instruction because of standardized testing and teaching to the test (Newkirk, 1999); dumbing down of curriculum to train a global workforce and fulfill government social engineering mandates (Iserbyt, 2000); dumbing down of the public in subliterate speeches by candidates for public office (Beard and Payack, 2000; Ravitch, 2001); the hegemony and rapid change of popular culture (National Association of Scholars, 2002); a global application of deconstructionism to education (Yardley, 1996); and dumbing down of the English language-a debate that traces back to pre-Elizabethan commentary (Cheke, 1561).

Of the various ills, “lack of writing...skills and practice” is a problem that institutions of higher learning address today through more courses on writing, writing-across-the-curriculum programs, and essay-writing requirements for assessment and evaluation. We can only hope that these programs will survive the standards tests and will successfully address the new essay portion of the SAT (Hoover, 2002; Young, 2003). This movement comes too late for the faculties of these institutions, however, most of whom need the same remediation.

Results of some state writing tests show that students need help developing topics-using detail and citing examples, elaborations that test-oriented writing curricula may neglect (Newkirk, 1999). As a publisher, former academic, and textbook developer, I often find precisely the same problems in the writing of students’ instructors. I read manuscripts with page after page of unrelentingly abstract prose, excessive jargon, and paragraph after paragraph about constructs with no hint that they have any empirical analogs in the real world. This kind of writing does not raise or maintain standards; it prevents or impedes learning.

Making writing accessible is not dumbing down. Revising expository writing to make it accessible to learners is not and should not be dumbing down in either form or intent. Offering concrete examples is not dumbing down, for example. Concrete elaborations let readers imagine, visualize, or identify with representations or exemplars of an abstraction. This vicarious experience, in turn, engenders self-confidence in learners, who more readily rise to the challenge of grasping the difficult or complex idea in aid of which the concrete example was advanced.

Other observers have noticed problems with academic writing, as the Journal of Philosophy and Literature’s “Bad Writing Contest” attests (Dutton, 1996). Robert Fulford, citing John Leo, calls it pomo-babble-“the tortured polysyllabic prose common in academic writing” (National Post, 7/15/03).

“Scholars in the humanities spend much of their time writing, and are forced constantly to read the work of superb writers. Yet they pour out streams of gnarled and barbarous sentences and don’t even know they are doing it…. Crimes against language are not victimless, of course. Academic life has become a publish and perish world: Professors publish, literacy perishes. Students perish too.”

I find it ironic that so few professors write well, especially for students, and that even fewer recognize this fact. Institutions and publications should provide more professional development opportunities for academics to learn to write sound expository prose. A more balanced attitude toward textbook publishing would be welcome also. A challenge with professors as authors is that many tend to regard their works as sacrosanct products of their intellect and standing, both hard-won. Frequently, then, they interpret requests for revision or development of their manuscripts as the publisher’s nefarious effort either to abridge academic freedom or to dumb down a scholarly work. These usually are misconceptions, based on the targeting of publishers by academics who see the media as an evil empire and tend to equate profitability with corruption.

Nevertheless, there are legitimate reasons, such as the following, that editors might have for asking textbook authors to change their organization, content, voice, or style.

· The book will be too long for its intended market or predetermined level of investment and has to be cut.
· Concepts lack adequate elaboration through concrete examples.
· Sources are not cited
· Undocumented opinions are presented as facts.
· Undocumented facts seem inaccurate or misleading.
· Information seems outdated or lacks currency.
· Topical coverage seems unbalanced, biased, or unexpected for the course.
· Material is judged to be strongly offensive to some or all readers.
· Examples, language, or expression are inappropriate to the intended reader, course, or subject.
· Vocabulary level is inappropriate for the course level.
· The writing is ungrammatical, wordy, or full of “pomo-babble.”
· Digressions or redundancy compromise meaning or coherence.
· Material is too similar to that in competing textbooks.
· Material invites claims of plagiarism or copyright infringement.
· Chapters lack appropriate apparatus and pedagogy.
· The manuscript departs significantly from a previously agreed-upon book plan.

None of these reasons involves a request to dumb down. Thus, academic authors should not make this claim to excuse writing that is not appropriate to their audience, course, or mission. Nor should they take it upon themselves to adulterate the knowledge they are attempting to convey. Students-whatever their state of knowledge-can detect gratuitously dumbed-down prose in an instant and are justifiably insulted. Dumbed-down prose is, in Orwell’s beloved cuttlefish ink analogy, “insincere” (Orwell, 1946).

Textbooks need to be sincere. They also need to be clear, coherent, and concise-the three C’s championed by William Strunk so long ago (1918). In addition, textbooks need to address their true readers-the actual students whose learning is at stake, not the professor’s dissertation committee, journal review board, or tenure committee, not colleagues, critics, or prize panels. Meeting learners “where they are” in their intellectual development does not require leaving out either big words or big ideas. Rather, it requires clarity, coherence, and concision of exposition, along with good glosses and sound pedagogy. Knowledge about learning also is required, because textbook writing is teaching, and deficits in college teaching certainly belong on anybody’s list of what’s wrong.

Mary Ellen Lepionka of Gloucester, MA, is the founder of Atlantic Path Publishing, author of Writing and Developing Your College Textbook (2003), and Writing and Developing College Textbook Supplements (2005), a former development editor, college instructor, and curriculum developer. See www.atlanticpathpublishing.com or contact Mary Ellen at me.lepionka@verizon.net.

References

Atkinson, Philip, A Theory of Civilization: A Study of Our Decline, 2000, www.ourcivilisation.com.

Beard, Robert and Paul Payack, “Presidential Debates Mirror Long-Term School Decline,” yourDictionary.com, 2000, www.yourdisctionary.com/library/prestart1.html

Cheke, Sir John, “[Our Own Tongue Clean and Pure], A Letter of syr I. Cheekes to His Louing Frind Mayster Thomas Hoby,” in The Norton Anthology of English Literature, Vol. 1, New York: W.W. Norton, 1962.

Dutton, Denis, “What Are Editors For?” Philosophy and Literature 20.2 (1996) 551-566. www.yourdictionary.com/library/prestart1.html

Fulford, Robert, “They Should Know Better: Humanities scholars spend lots of time reading, so why can’t they write? National Post, July 15, 2003. www.robertfulford.com.

Hodges, Michael, “Grandfather Economic Reports,” in Michael Hodges and William Mechlenburg, Grandfather Education Report, updated February 2003, http://mwhodges.home.att.net/college.htm.

Hoover, Eric, College Board Approves Major Changes for the SAT,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 5, 2002, http://chronicle.com/prm/weekly.v48/i43/43a03401.htm.

Iserbyt, Charlotte, The Deliberate Dumbing Down of America, Conscience Press, 2000, www.bookviews.com/BookPage/dumbdown.html.

National Association of Scholars, Today’s College Students and Yesteryear’s High School Grads: A Comparison of General Cultural Knowledge, NAS, 2/18/02, www.nas.org/reports.html.

Newkirk, Thomas, “Teaching to the Test Means ‘Dumbing Down’ the Curriculum,” UHN News Bureau, 12/1/99, www.unh.edu/news/Dec99/tm_19991201curriculum.html.

Orwell, George, “Politics and the English Language,” Horizon, April 1946, www.k-1.com/orwell/index.cgi/work/essays/language.html.

Ravitch, Diane, Dumbing Down the Public: Why It Matters, Hoover Institution, 1/15/01, www.hoover.stanford.edu/pubaffairs/we/current/ravitch_0101.html.

Schlafly, Phyllis, “The Dumbing Down of America’s Colleges,” Eagle Forum 29:9, 4/11/96. www.eagleforum.org

Strunk, William, The Elements of Style, Ithaca, NY: Humphrey, 1918. www.bartleby.com/141.

Yardley, Jonathan, “Lowest Common Denominator,” Washington Post, Sunday, June 30, 1996; www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/reviews/dumbing.htm