Sophie Hannah

Mark Worden (Standard British accent):

Sophie Hannah is the author of the crime thriller The Point of Rescue, which was recently published in Italian by Garzanti as Non è lui. In addition to her crime fiction, she has published collections of poetry,  as well as children’s books.  She has also taught creative writing at university, where she has noticed a decline in literacy standards. She talked to Speak Up about this:

Sophie Hannah (Standard British accent/mild northern accent):

I used to work in a university briefly, and the students I was getting were, you know, not able to write sentences, their punctuation was terrible, their grammar was terrible. I mean, obviously, there were exceptions, but I can remember saying to one of my creative writing classes, “You really need to learn how to write the English language. The spelling’s so bad and the punctuation’s so bad that I can’t actually get past that, to see whether your stories are any good or not, because I keep tripping up over this bad writing,” and they just all looked at me like I was some kind of weirdo and said, “Well, we’ve put it through Spell Check,” and I said, “Yes, but Spell Check’s not always reliable and wouldn’t you like to be in a position where you know whether Spell Check is correct or not, in any case,” and they sort of shrugged and said, “No, not really.” I mean, obviously that’s not all universities, some universities are much better than the one that I taught in. Oxford and Cambridge are still very good, London, UCL, is good and there are a few others, but, yes, in general, I would say that the English education system is not  in a very good state. The last however many years of the Labour government, lots of money’s been thrown at education, but in the wrong way, so everybody’s got shiny new computers, but  still nobody can spell, punctuate, add up, you know!

(Sophie Hannah was talking to Mark Worden)

 LINKS

http://www.sophiehannah.com

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