...............................................................................................................................................................
...............................................................................................................................................................
|
Talk Can Be Really Cheap President Ruth Simmons unwittingly touched a nerve this winter when she spoke out about the casual language college students favor when they parley with their peers. She called it "mallspeak"--the dialect that is sprinkled with "like," "I mean," "you know" and "whatever." In a front-page Boston Globe story about Smith's "Speaking Across the Curriculum" program, Simmons expressed her distaste for such talk: "It's minimalist, it's reductionist, it's repetitive, it's imprecise, it's inarticulate, it's vernacular. It drives me crazy." Even outside academia, critics have despairingly commented on the state of American discourse. Bad speaking reflects sloppy thinking, they say. When the television sitcom It's Like, You Know ... debuted on ABC in March Newsweek commented that its title "could easily serve as an assessment of its overall quality." And last July, Senator Robert Byrd was heard to complain on the Senate floor about the "pernicious" plague of the vernacular on proper English. So Simmons' comments, grounded in a straightforward Globe story in January about new curricular efforts at Smith and other colleges, opened the floodgates. National media attention, requests for interviews from as far away as South Africa and cheering letters from frustrated parents and officials from other schools followed. "I applaud your attempt to correct the speech patterns of our youth," wrote one father from California. "I thought no one was listening. I have three teens in my household. My individual battle seems to be fruitless." The media spotlight on anxiety about articulation (and Smith's curricular attention to that) continues with recent, lengthy articles in both The Los Angeles Times and The Chronicle of Higher Education. Smaller Associated Press reports have appeared in dozens of daily newspapers across the country. The Kansas City Star, Philadelphia Inquirer, USA Today and others gushed over the new initiatives taken at Smith and other institutions-including Mount Holyoke, Wesleyan and Stanford-to "stamp out mallspeak" and enable students to hone their public speaking skills. At Smith, that means students are now expected to deliver, and often be evaluated on, a variety of oral presentations whether in science or humanities courses. The presentations are a particular focus of the college's new first-year seminars which are billed as being both writing- and speaking-intensive. The story also aired nationally on the Fox-News Network and on ABC's Good Morning America. As correspondent Bill Blakemore said after visiting the campus and interviewing Simmons, faculty members and students, "Concision, elocution, even comportment are fighting their way back into the classroom." Meanwhile not all Smith students wholeheartedly appreciated President Simmons' comments. An editorial in the Sophian, the student newspaper, took issue with the media brouhaha, arguing that Smith students are savvy enough to know when they need to shift from the vernacular into more formal English. "We daresay that Smith women, in most cases, can control their mouths and change their pattern of speech depending upon the situation with practice," the editorial said. "On this campus casual conversation is just that: casual. But when it comes time to act like professionals and speak like professionals, Smith women have what it takes to make that transition. How else would one explain Smith's incredible success rate? It is doubtful that success could be chalked up to wowing employers with ever more inventive ways to utilize the word 'dude.'" The Sophian nonetheless conceded that "speech-improvement programs such as 'Speaking Across the Curriculum' are positive developments." And in a typical burst of affirmation and humor, it concluded: "In response to President Simmons' question, 'Where will we be in another 30 years?' we quite confidently answer, 'Like, running the world, you know?'" |
..............................................................................................................................................................
NewsSmith
is published by the Smith College Office of College Relations
for alumnae, staff, students and friends.
Copyright © 1998, Smith College. Portions of this publication
may be reproduced with the permission of the Office
of College Relations, Garrison Hall, Smith College, Northampton,
Massachusetts 01063. Last update: 4/26/99.
Made
with Macintosh
