Poverty of expression

In the past I have written about the challenge many talented Pakistani students face as they apply for graduate school admission in the US. They struggle to excite the admission committee — including one at the institution where I work — due to weak personal essays and lack of preparation in making clear arguments about their background, their passion and their interest in a particular graduate programme. In an increasingly competitive pool, this becomes a major handicap. This lack of preparation has fed into a marketplace of unethical behaviour, where some students with financial resources hire essay writers. Unfortunately the presence and proliferation of this trend is a deeply disturbing development and one that further alienates those with modest means.

For the longest time, my perspective about the ability to write and express was inherently myopic. I only viewed it exclusively from the lens of university admissions. I now recognise that our prospective students are not the only ones who struggle to express themselves. Over the last few years I have had the opportunity to work closely with colleagues in the public bureaucratic sector as well. The problem, to put it mildly, is much worse there. Many of us are familiar with the reality that the government memos and documents are written in a strange alphabet soup that is bizarre, archaic and often nonsensical. It is a poisonous mixture of old colonial writing style, incomprehensible sentence structure and a rigid approach to document creation.

In my experience with several ministries, I would write something to explain the project and various aspects of its structure, which would then go through a strange process that is more like sausage making than editorial polishing. On the other end of this process would be a product that would look nothing like the ingredients. Worst of all, it would not always be comprehensible to the bureaucrats themselves who were in charge of writing those documents and who would gladly sign off on them. I have often needed serious translation services to understand my own proposal.

In my experience with the public sector, I was surprised to see outside consultants hired routinely to produce ministerial project proposals, perhaps because the ministry staff were never trained to write effectively. The outside consultants were happy to cash in by using boiler plate material and cutting and pasting from other proposals that they had written in the past. However, when the time came to defend the proposals in front of those who control the purse strings, the staff members were required to defend against criticisms of a proposal that they never really wrote.

There are some who would argue that the entire problem is a consequence of writing in a language that is not native. That argument in, and of itself, may have some merit. But that argument is weakened by two observations. First, I am not sure if our Urdu expression is particularly sound, and more importantly, as far as the bureaucracy is concerned, we have chosen ourselves to have our official communication in English.

Similar to the situation with the students, the issue here is not fundamentally of capability, but priority. I do not think that the public sector staff is incapable of producing clear, concise and well-argued documents and proposals. Just as I do not think that our students cannot produce well-written personal statements. The issue is lack of seriousness and attention to this matter. Good writing takes time, effort and mentorship. It also requires practice. A cursory analysis of what we teach, and how we test, when it comes to writing is enough to explain the current state of affairs. The exams testing the capacity to write, whether they are in high school, college, universities or for the national civil services, are embarrassing. The absence of making this a priority is not just depriving our students of the opportunity to be admitted at international institutions of higher learning, it is also adding completely unnecessary expenses to our exchequer by engaging consultants who are cashing in on our own incompetence. We are choosing deliberately to underperform.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 4^th, 2023.

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