From The New York Times via Metafilter, reader response theorist Stanley Fish explains why kids no write so good:

Most composition courses that American students take today emphasize content rather than form, on the theory that if you chew over big ideas long enough, the ability to write about them will (mysteriously) follow. The theory is wrong. Content is a lure and a delusion, and it should be banished from the classroom. Form is the way.

While I never took freshman composition, I'm assured that the activities were tedious and stupid. At Miami University, some instructors were graduate students who were forced into teaching freshman composition. Some of the instructors were honest-to-God tenured full professors, since Miami requires that real professors teach a section of freshman composition every now and then. But in high school, we were taught "journaling," the action of just writing and writing and writing. We were never critiqued on the content of these journals, just whether or not we had done them. Fish believes -- and I agree -- that this is a pointless exercise.

Fish's solution of having freshmen create their own language is a bit extreme, but it emphasizes the point that incoming college students don't know how their own language works! "Grammar" as a subject is missing, replaced in elementary school by the nebulous "language arts" (another theorist or professor lamented the popularity of "social studies" in the same way), which encompass literature and composition, but never any grammar. Students learn how to read, but they don't learn how to write.

Trust me. I've read papers written by senior college students, and the kind of crap they turn out is frightening. No one ever taught these students what good sentences sound like, and no one sure as hell ever taught them not to use the passive voice all the time. This is a catastrophe that will not be put up with by me! Students have learned that they shouldn't make their arguments too assertive (where, I'm not sure), so they water down their statements by having things acted upon by nebulous outside forces. While the passive voice has its place -- sometimes, sources aren't clear, so things must "be said," or sometimes, the passive voice breaks up a monotonous string of active statements -- the passive voice sounds wishy-washy and weak.

Students these days also can't construct coherent thoughts. Since seventh grade, students have been using the same cliched idioms to spice up their writing. I have read entire papers that appeared to be nothing more than strings of cliches about "similarities," "differences," and "contrasts." This, however, can be traced to laziness: some students write papers the night before and their quality is horrible. In my dealings with students, they can recognize when things sound bad, so it's not that they don't know when a string of cliches is being used, it's just that they don't want to take the time to write good papers.

Stringing cliches together fooled the teachers in high school, but it doesn't fly in college. Students who enter college are grossly under-prepared and haven't been taught how to write well. They haven't written enough long papers (a brief survey of my friends revealed that most of them hadn't written papers longer than five pages in high school. At the end of my senior year in high school, I had to write a 15-page literary analysis), which means they aren't prepared for college writing, where five pages is a night's homework and final exams can typically be fifteen pages for a single class.

College professors assume that kids know how to write, but it turns out that they don't, which means they have to spend time during freshman year teaching kids the ins and outs of good writing: eliminating cliches, making an arguable thesis, defending the thesis (which includes refuting counterpoints), and writing in the active voice.

I was fortunate enough to be in a school system that really really emphasized writing. I wrote until I was blue in the face, but I was all the better for it at college. And in the real world, by the way, people don't know how to write, either. Businesses are constantly on the lookout for people who can write well. Teams usually have a good writer on them, because the engineer may be brilliant, but he certainly can't communicate that brilliance in a brilliant way. So hire a brilliant writer to make those brilliant ideas sound as brilliant as they really are!

Oh, and don't overuse words.