Young new authors?

[ronde]

Back in Feb, The New Yorker published an essay on "The end of the English major" talking about the demise of humanities degrees. A rather stunning quote therein: "Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me ... “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”"

Which has me wondering. Are there still young people who can write good stories? Because I would think identifying subjects and verbs would be awful useful in writing. Or will be just be reading GPT-4 stories in the next decade?

I think the decline in students studying the humanities is simply a lack of job opportunities in today's world. I grew up before the internet existed. The only form of exchanging information and ideas was books, magazines, and newspapers. Television and radio did some, but any in depth information came in printed form. That meant there were a lot of jobs available for people who could write coherently about their particular subject. That required a very good knowledge of the structure of the English language. Vocabulary wasn't as important as structure because many magazine and newspaper articles were aimed at a reading level of 8th grade. Books were available in all reading levels. Publishers were open to taking a risk on new authors.

Even correspondence between individuals was written unless it was over the phone. It was important to learn to write correctly because that was how the person reading was able to understand you. The way a person wrote was also considered to be somewhat a measure of intelligence.

My freshman year in college, both semesters had Rhetoric 101 and Rhetoric 102 as required classes for every degree. These classes were required classes for any technical degree and were designed to teach students in these fields how to write concise and easily understood correspondence relative to their future occupations.

In today's world, the internet contains vastly more knowledge that is instantly accessible. It isn't necessary for two magazines to print two articles about the same subject as was often done in the past. It isn't even necessary to print a magazine. Today, many formerly popular magazines have disappeared, and many newspaper articles are shared across many newspapers rather than being generated by local reporters. Publishers tend to stay with known authors because of the cost of printing books and the fact that the market for books has decreased. Many well known book stores have also closed simply because of the lack of sales. With a reduction in the market comes a reduction in the need for producers of the products for that market.

Personal correspondence via pen and paper has also greatly diminished, being replaced by email and texting and the accompanying two to five letter abbreviations for words or even entire thoughts. This change in our use of language has nearly eliminated the need to understand a lot of what is taught in schools. The emergence of actual artificial intelligence will tend to further eliminate that need as well as continue to reduce the job opportunities available to students with a genuine interest in writing.

 

[SimonDoom]

My sense is it's a mixed bag. I think people are generally getting more intelligent, and there's no question that the stock of available knowledge is growing at an incredibly fast pace. Being good at what you do requires more and more specialization, which makes it less valuable to be an "educated" person in the sense somebody was 100 years or so ago, where such persons were all expected to know the same discrete body of knowledge.

I doubt writing will decline at the high end, because the desire to read and write is too strong. But the path there -- such as through getting English degrees -- may change.