in response to my previous post i have found more of Adeline Courtney Bartlett's writing, including an essay she wrote for Harper's Bazaar in 1940 called "'They Write Worse and Worse'" that takes direct and unflinching aim at the claim that students 'write worse and worse these days' and explains social and political reasons for the claim and students' behavior. it's full of blistering lines like:
"When [the cheating and presumably rich student called Smith]'s mother pays her ghost to write club papers and his father pays more than one ghost to write after-dinner speeches and business addresses, who is Smith to criticize the family ethics?"
"If, for instance, you should ever grasp the fact that some of the usages you dearly love are, in the opinion of competent philologists, not merely not the only 'correct' locutions, but sometimes actually 'incorrect,' you might have more charity when some expression on the lips or the paper of a new student or a new stenographer happened to conflict with your own pet notions. You might even learn to see the spacious confines of the wood, which you have heretofore missed, because you have always been so busy pruning the trees."
and the real cincher at the end:
But it would help most, Mr. B[usiness World], if you discouraged cheating in academic work, even that done by your own sons and daughters. If you had, instead of a half-contemptuous lip service, a genuine respect for scholarly standards and scholarly achievements, my students---your young jobhunters---would have it too. They would write 'correctly' and fluently.
In short, the millennium would have arrived.
in all, this reads like it was written within the last five years, possibly in response to woeful op-eds that bemoan student use of AI, and she pulls off possibly the most scathing and funny asterisk i have seen in a hot minute.
