I work in the media and my experience with the quality of writing of many of our young people is really not encouraging. I encounter this disappointment with young people outside our industry too.
By
Uche Nworah
Many struggle to string together words
and sentences. They have very poor understanding of writing protocol. Some will
write formal letters without signing it and expect you to attend to such
document. You will shudder at the job applications many of them turn in.
Despite the spelling checks on their phones and computers, they continue to
abuse the English language and will write without reading through, and editing
what they have written before pushing such out for public or third party
consumption.
Many people blame the universities and
schools for not putting the students through rigour. I remember that in our
days, some lecturers will award special marks for use of language. I don’t know
if that still happens. Is it that the lecturers can’t be bothered or that they
are also struggling with the language themselves? That notwithstanding, I chose
to blame young people instead who make minimal effort and come to the ‘party’
not prepared.
We (our generation) did not wake up
overnight to become who we have become. Let’s take the media industry for
example. Before we went to study mass communication and some of the other
social science courses, we already had built up a repertoire of skills,
especially in the use of English language. Our word banks had been enlarged
through playing the game of scrabble, reading newspapers, magazines, journals
and novels.
Perhaps we were helped by that classic book ‘An English Companion’, which we all owned. It came in handy when composing love letters and writing letters to our pen pals in foreign lands (do young people know what pen pal means?).
I was a guest speaker at Nnamdi Azikiwe
University recently when a student association was inaugurated. I used novels
in the Pacesetters series, African Writers Series (AWS) under which Chinua
Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published, likewise others by authors such as
Enid Blyton, James Hardley Chase, Nick Carter, Mills and Boons series which we
read in secondary school to give examples. We graduated to reading Jeffrey
Archer, Jackie Collins, Robert Ludlum, Mario Puzo etc in the university.
Through these books, we improved on our English language and also expanded our
worldview. Of course those books provided materials for generating interesting
conversations with the opposite sex.
When i asked, nobody in the audience
said they had read any novel lately. Should we be surprised that a consulting
firm in Nigeria in a recent recruitment advertisement only invited graduates
from foreign universities? I disclosed this fact to the students, not to scare
them but to let them know the harsh reality of the corporate world they will
eventually enter. I hoped that this will make them to put in more effort.
What are our young people reading these
days?
Journalist Uche Ezechukwu in an online
post made by the blogger, Chris Kehinde Nwandu (CKN) which inspired this musing
jokingly said that young people watch Big Brother. This is indeed a sad
commentary of how borrowed western pop culture has gradually eaten deep into
the fabrics of our society and eroded some of our values. Our young ones have
come off worse.
It’s surprising that even in an age of
plenty, with the internet and mobile devices in their palms which easily
contain millions of freely available books and novels, young people seem not to
be bothered. With kindle and all the other applications available, our young
people appear not to be interested and this is indeed very unfortunate.
They are not reading. Many are
facebooking, slaying, instagramming and socialising online. Of course using
their abbreviated words and language. This is the language they try to bring
into corporate life and the real world. Thankfully, there are some people that
are carrying out a personal campaign to discourage the spread of such
abbreviated words. My senior colleague, Sir Willie Nwokoye, Principal Secretary
to Governor Willie Obiano will not attend to, or respond to text or Whatsapp
messages, or letters containing such abbreviated words such as KK for Ok, 2moro
for Tomorrow, LMAO for Laugh My Ass Off, ROTF for Rolling On The Floor etc.
In our days, clutching a novel was
almost a status symbol for young people. It showed somewhat a cosmopolitan,
educated and savvy person. We would buy some and after reading, we will
exchange the ones we have for the ones we don’t have with neighbours, friends
and friends of friends. Storylines in the novels were usually hot topics for
debates and discussions amongst young people. This made everyone to read and be
abreast so as to be ready for eventual informal debates and discussions.
There is no short cut to success
especially in the knowledge economy. We have to get our young people to get
back to the basics. They should begin to read, read and read. This perhaps may
just be the best way to break the ‘educated illiterate’ cycle.
uchenworah@yahoo.com
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