Answer on 9/14/2008

Von’Dragas Smalley

This article intends to show the reader how students begin writing atrociously from an early age. Students start by learning English in a manner that is neither comfortable nor effective for writing. The text books that students learn from give them a false model for purely efficient English. Doomed from the start, students believe their teachers are looking for scholarly language that the student is clearly not familiar with. According to the author Ken Macrorie, “Even the textbook begins with an Engfish sentence, and surely it should be a model of writing for students.” The early learning of English incorrectly, therefore, leads to speaking and writing ineffectively. Macrorie has termed this atrocious and wrong writing style as “Engfish” in his book Telling Writing.