Did You Just Ask Me to Dumb it Down?!

For the first thirteen years of school, most of us (if not all) were beaten senseless with proper grammar, good sentence structure, big words, and eloquent writing styles. For me, I believe this writing boot camp began in about the third grade. You see, I am a Florida girl, and of course, our schools practically bow down to the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test-- the dreaded, ferocious, and in my eyes feral FCAT. In third grade, I was first introduced to a thesaurus. "Don't say good, use admiral, congenial, or stupendous instead... Make sure those sentences are long and flowing, its more eloquent that way... Your score will be higher, and of course your writing will be superior if you follow our guidelines." It continued though middle school, and the beginning of high school. We learned to write for the FCAT, we attended more FCAT writing workshops than church meetings. Eventually, we took our last installment of the test in tenth grade, and providing we passed it, moved on to bigger and better writing. In my last two years of English classes, if I wrote an FCAT style paper, my teacher threatened to burn me at the stake. "That style is no good, it is elementary, your professors will laugh you out of college with that garbage." And so, I survived and entered FGCU as a Communications major. She was right, the Comp professors get quite agitated with small words and over usage of adverbs. But in the Public Relations classes, there is a recurrent theme. "You have to write on a 4th to 6th grade level." What?! I spent all these years toiling over improving my writing, learning big words, actually discovering what an adverb is, and now you're telling me to intentionally dumb it down?! I understand the logic behind it, yet it still fascinates me to see the irony of it all. Wait-- irony... That might be a 7th grade word...