Response to "Frequency of Error in Current College Writing"

     This was an interesting read that refuted some current doomsday exhortations about the abysmal state of today's education system.  There's room for improvement...for sure...massive improvement, but the research conducted for this paper shows that student writing actually increased in length and remained consistent in number of errors in error between 1917 and 1986.  This demonstrates significant improvement  because production has almost doubled during the aforementioned years. Add to this fact, the high school graduation rate, while not good enough, has skyrocketed since that time.
     In addition, more good news...the students in the classroom represent a much more diverse body.  People from different cultures, with different first languages, home languages and dialects populate today's university classrooms, yet with a significantly larger number of language and cultural issues to address, instructors and students are still managing to maintain a standard set in a much less diverse classroom. I think that this information could actually be considered improvement in student writing over time.
     While we need to keep working toward implementing better techniques to serve our students, I think that the evidence in this paper is indicative of positive momentum in the educational system.  I know that there are a lot of dedicated instructors working hard to provide opportunities for historically underserved students.