Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.

In our time it is broadly true that political writing is bad writing. Where it is not true, it will generally be found that the writer is some kind of rebel, expressing his private opinions, and not a ‘party line’.

It is often easier to make up words of this kind (deregionalize, impermissible, extramarital, non-fragmentatory and so forth) than to think up the English words that will cover one’s meaning. The result, in general, is an increase in slovenliness and vagueness.

there is no real need for any of the hundreds of foreign phrases now current in English.

This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.

When the Voice of Britain is heard at nine o’clock, better far and infinitely less ludicrous to hear aitches honestly dropped than the present priggish, inflated, inhibited, school-ma’amish arch braying of blameless bashful mewing maidens!

Above all, we cannot play ducks and drakes with a native battery of idioms which prescribes egregious collocations of vocables as the Basic put up with for tolerate, or put at a loss for bewilder.

but because they illustrate various of the mental vices from which we now suffer. They are a little below the average, but are fairly representative examples. I number them so that I can refer back to them when necessary:

Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration: so that the fight against bad English is not frivolous and is not the exclusive concern of professional writers.

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it.

He notes that some textbook publishers, like Macmillan, are already embedding AI tutors into their learning platforms, so why shouldn’t students take advantage of the tools at their disposal?

His university is ahead of the curve in offering such training, he says, but on many campuses professional-development money is usually reserved for, say, sending professors to conferences. What they need instead is more immediate and flexible training.

“People would rather talk about the big picture and how the world is going to change than the nuts and bolts of how to operate every day.”

Another explanation for this disconnection may be that administrators are more upbeat about AI’s influence on teaching than professors are.

A STEM professor may encourage students to use AI to polish their writing if that helps them better articulate scientific concepts. But a humanities professor might balk, since clear and coherent writing is central to mastering the discipline.

He liked the idea that the tool could help students with hidden disabilities or those who struggle with English as a second language. “I thought at the time this would be great,” he recalls.

Watkins believes, don’t fully understand this marketplace, something he has been focusing on in a series of articles on Substack. The landscape will only get more complicated, he notes, with developments such as OpenAI’s

One study published in 2000 found that just 20 percent of students normally did their class reading in 1997 — down from 80 percent in 1981.

In short, professors say students are coming into college with a host of new and alarming learning challenges, including fragmented and distracted thinking, along with sharper limits on what they are willing or able to do.

18 years ago, new students were able to synthesize and summarize information from multiple lectures on a topic to extract general principles they could apply in new situations.