Steve, where do you get the idea that I spent decades learning to write better? I have not spent a single minute of my life learning to write at all. I haven’t studied it, never examined it, and was published pretty much by the time I was 10 or 11 years old. I won my first national writing competition when I was 18. The guy who was the judge was the marketing director of the biggest newspaper group in South Africa at that time, and he said it was the finest piece of writing he had seen in 20 years.

Google my portfolio. I have always written, very seldom had my work rejected (where I have submitted it), and when it has been rejected, I have had high praise for the quality of writing – just the topic was off.

I cannot prove that I saw a study that said that 95% of students couldn’t write a grammatical sentence. Maybe it said that 95% of students couldn’t write grammatically. The bottom line is that I returned to college in my mid-50s in the States, and there were maybe three people in a class of 30 who could put sentences together. Even the professor (who had a masters in English) couldn’t do it.

Surely, the sources I provided for my article back up what I say?

You say “(How do you learn to write? You write, critique what you written, and try again. It is an arduous task and few take it on.”

Are you being serious? That is simply too much trouble. If pretty much the first draft I write is accepted for publication (by print magazines in the days I submitted for publication), why on earth would I go through all that rigmarole?

In the South Africa, I grew up in, you were not permitted entry to university unless you had the qualifying criteria – 3 languages, 1 science, and math. Your first language had to be to publication standard.

College text books are extremely badly written, precisely because fluency in language is no longer a requirement for college entrance. It used to be in my day.