Almost fifty years ago Ken Macrorie invented a term for a pretentious and vapid style of writing that secondary and college teachers unconsciously reinforce in their push for formality in student prose: “Engfish.”  It is writing that goes through the motions, but discloses nothing, writing that skims the surface with cliches or empty words. In Uptaught Macrorie describes how a student essay inspired this term:

This girl had given me a name for the bloated, pretentious language I saw everywhere around me, in the students’ themes, in the textbooks on writing, in the professors and administrators’ communications with each other. A feel-nothing, say-nothing language, dead like Latin, devoid of the rhythms of contemporary speech. A dialect in which words are never  “attached to things,” as Emerson said they should be (18).

This style, unfortunately, often gets the “A’s,” because it sounds important and frequently shows a command of mechanics. As Macrorie observed, it pervades all levels of education. E.B. White fought it with prescriptive advice in The Elements of Style and Richard Lanham located it in the upper levels of bureaucracy and called it “The Official Style” (Revising Prose, 1999). It is hardly limited to struggling college freshmen.

Almost exactly two years ago, I confessed to my own addiction to Engfish as a high school student. In that blog, “The Science of Writing” I revealed:

I fancied myself a writer in high school, but when I look back at my preserved fragments I am shocked by the pompous and impersonal style that was rewarded by my teachers. In a series of responses to college admissions questions, I pontificated.

Question #1: Why do you want to go to college?

“The most evident purpose of the collegiate experience is to broaden the scope of education while making it especially relevant to a field of study. I sense the crying need to systemize [sic] the great chaotic whirlpool of information into the universal outlook of college training and impending need to study seriously my chosen field of work.  I expect college to carry me beyond education to the developing of a technique of study.”

One might argue that the first person singular is present in this excerpt, but I refuse to accept that cold, pretentious voice as my own. I want to have compassion on that sixteen-year-old with lofty dreams of college, but I feel completely alienated from that affected style, that pretend academic diction. If I were this kid’s teacher, I would tell him to write about why he loves the New York Yankees or pizza, get him grounded in real language about real experience.  Maybe I could deflate his diction and connect with his passions.

So this is origin of my contempt for Engfish. In high school I was considered one of the best writers in my class, wrote for the yearbook and the school newspaper, won a local essay contest,  all for the publishing of Engfish.  I was a master of saying nothing in the best style.  I shudder to think of what my Freshmen English teachers thought when my beige prose arrived in college.

Ultimately I learned to write as a reporter for the Spectator, the college newspaper, and later I retrieved what was left of my voice in a summer at the Boston Writing Project.  I learned very little about writing in actual writing classes. I felt betrayed by the system that let me loose on the world with nothing to offer but Engfish.

The National Writing Project chopped away at this unfortunate style by declaring that “all teachers of writing should be writers.” This meant we delivered our prose to real readers and heard what they heard. Ultimately this was my cure for Engfish. The summer I attended the Boston Writing Project I was among a host of would-be writers who would only affirm what touched their reader sensibilities. We learned to write what we felt without embellishment, and we discovered how powerful that could be.

Since English teachers are often the perpetrators of Engfish and its followers, I have made it my life’s mission to go after it. Not to punish students for giving in to its seductive rhythmic nothingness, but to help them find the language that still lives in them, what Macrorie has called their “voice.” This term is not without controversy, but I’ll save it for another blog.

For today I offer  the funeral rites for “Engfish” from Macrorie’s entry, May 7, 1964, “The Day We Killed Engfish.”

Not until I heard the third paper that afternoon did I realize that everyone on the grass had quit gazing around and was listening hard. Each student had written a powerful short paper and I had broken through and the students were speaking in their own voices about things that counted for them (21).