Do you teach for TOEBL (the Test of English as a Banal Language)? Or, are you studying to pass it? I mean banal, as in trite, hackneyed, clichéd, platitudinous, stale, stereotyped, and dull. As an ESL teacher, I ask this question after attempting to model for my students five level-five responses to TOEFL independent essay prompts. As an English student, I'd had many teachers, beyond the one-armed Mr. Dougherty back in middle school, program my mind with the same mantra: Show, don't tell. So, what better way to help ESL students pass the independent essay section than show them how it is done? Give them a formula and then demonstrate how to follow it.
However, while I am proud of trying out writing assignments myself before teaching how to do them, I am now even more disgusted with the standardized writing test that has become as ubiquitous as those square robin's-egg-blue covered composition booklets (I know I am showing my age here) in both native and non-native English classes. Some know the aforementioned writing standard as the five-paragraph essay. Some teachers have attended meetings with each other where they have lowered their heads and conceded that this formula is basically useless except as training wheels for beginning composition writers and composition test takers. Where in the artistic or commercial world of writing have anglophiles seen The Formula, applied, get past a market-savvy editor?
By this point my readers today should have a clear enough idea of what I am talking about and why. I will move on to my thesis statement: The independent essay section of the TOEFL contributes to the proliferation of banal writing via the way the prompts are phrased and its thirty-minute time limit.
According to my thesis, I suspect my readers anticipate only two content development paragraphs, not three, and some are wincing already at this violation of The Formula. However, I will develop three topics of content, beginning with some emphasis on the phenomenon of the proliferation of banal writing. Ultimately, only the universe knows the true cause of banal writing and all I am doing is some near-sighted finger-pointing in not-very-zen-like exasperation. After over two decades of being strong-armed by the Texas, New Jersey, and Virginia state boards of education to devote months of classroom time every year to what in grad school at the University of Texas, El Paso, Dr. David Schwalm had called “teaching to the test”, I left the classroom more than a little exasperated.
Eventually and hungrily, my zealot's faith in the internet's promise to save the world led me to log on as a Smarthinking tutor, paid by the hour to guide college and graduate students in passing their essay and report assignments, and their thesis and dissertation boards. Because when someone's confidentiality is at stake one can't always “show”, my readers today will have to take my word for it that the stacks of stale virtual-paper banalities passing across my Windows desktop every day was suffocating. And, though they could be deleted, they could not be helped. The mediocrity did not begin with the student. It began with the assignments that were not first tested by their givers, to say the least.
To say more, those English 101 assignments were routinely phrased in a way that set the stage for perhaps four to eight more college years of banality. The TOEFL independent essay prompts typify this misdirection. For example, given: “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: People should sometimes do things that they do not enjoy doing. Use specific reasons and details to support your answer.” Now, let's see what happens when even a degreed writer is prompted to write about “people”, those faceless, ageless, sexless stick figures most notorious for their role in the game of hangman. One writer fastens the following first-sentence-hook to reel readers in and play them like tuna: “Life is challenging.” Oh well, it is probably just a poor, off-shore educated fool who tested out of the foundational course that indoctrinates freshmen in the seven steps to becoming a more scintillating writer, right? But, what if the ESL graduate has a web site that presumes to teach non-native speakers how to pass the TOEFL independent essay test? (See i-courses.org.)
A comprehensive critique of the complete offending sample essay is beyond the scope of this article. I will "rip it a new one" in a future post. Instead, here I will annotate an adequate number of TOEFL prompts to help substantiate my implied assertion that banality is a successful meme. 1) “Nowadays, food has become easier to prepare. Has this change improved the way people live? Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.” Preparing food is challenging. 2) “Do you agree or disagree with the following statement? Universities should give the same amount of money to their students’ sports activities as they give to their university libraries. Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion.” Budgeting for school athletics and literacy is challenging. 3) “People work because they need money to live. What are some other reasons that people work? Discuss one or more of these reasons. Use specific examples and details to support your answer.” Work is challenging.
There, that takes care of the first sentence to any essay that comes between me and my dream job supervising all the people who are better writers than I am. (Now for the template sentences that get me to my template thesis....) Though, in all fairness, I must applaud every TOEFL prompt that features the following component: “Which do you prefer?” Hey, you talking to me? However, the template's “use specific reasons and examples”, no matter how varied the syntax, perhaps because of its very predictability, seems to go right over the head of a hack, so I implore those at the top of the ETS heap to scrap all the “people” in favor of “you” and “your”, to snap sophomoric writers' heads out of their rhinestone vocabulary bling belly buttons.
What was my final content topic? I've been writing so long now I can't remember. Oh yes, the imposed thirty-minute time limit. How my heart sinks for every creative writer, both dormant and self-actualized, who encounters such compelling topics as parenting, environmentalism, friendship, animal welfare, urban planning, technology, and government spending. These frustrated poets and philosophers must be frothing at the mouth to be channeled and acknowledged, only to be either subjugated to IKEA-assembly of mass produced particle board, nuts, and bolts verbiage, or to repeat the old adage “Ya want fries with that” ad nauseam (as in “you are breathing borrowed air” and not the role play card game).
Heaven help those who don't even know that an essay in first person singular point of view is not only permitted, it has been proven by such greats as Jack London, Montaigne, Zora Neale Hurston, and Erma Bombeck. But, once divinely helped, given a prompt about friends or family, what truly gifted writer would pluck prematurely while conjuring Aunt Mimi the opera singer or Huxley the standard poodle before the complete ripening of a metaphor? Endless hours of classroom time, either face to face or virtual, tick by in thirty minute mini-ordeals, so that the dullards may master writing by numbers, and the effervescent may reward themselves for swallowing their poetic pride with a spiked Dr. Pepper during break.
At the risk of committing a first person crime, defined by Tracy Kidder's The Best American Essays 1994, partly as “Pretending to confess to their bad behavior, they revel in their colorfulness”, I ask, which is worse, over-the-top from the unbridled brilliant who eventually learn the difference between a coffee house rant and a company memo, or under-the-gun from the perfect spellers who would evaluate moon walks with a stop watch?
Upon re-entry into the earth's atmosphere, albeit scorched by a self-indulgent passion, I am still tightly gripping my readers' hands, beseeching, as TOEFL teachers or students, please do whatever you can to fight the proliferation of banal writing. Write in first person about Uncle Elmo and the faded pink dashboard fleece. Conceal a copy of Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” among the pages of your TOEFL or SAT prep guide. Whether teaching or learning, try your hand at some TOEFL prompts, throw caution to the wind and develop two content topics into full sonatas instead of three two-sentence wonders in Stephen Hawkings's automaton voice, slander a personal friend or relative, confess to a fictitious crime committed among the aisles of a Dollar Store, live in a fraudulent city, identify the cheap fragrance your test scorers will wear, stack all those stick figure “people” together and burn them in effigy, exorcising all prosaic banality from the left cerebral hemispheres of your children and your children's children. You can keep your stop watch. You'll need it when you practice being perfectly mediocre for the TOEFL. But please, help me shield the collective immigrant mind from yet another meme of mediocrity.
P.S. My audio features the obsolete British pronunciation of the word, banal. I like it because it rhymes with anal.
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