The Fate of The Sentence: Is the Writing On the Wall?

Being able to write clearly is essential to getting a good job, Siegel says. "I'm not seeing most students care about that," she says.

"In developing an idea," she explains, "it is essential that a paragraph begin with a clear topic sentence from which the idea is developed and expanded by the following sentences. Many students are lost because that beginning sentence lacks a driving or principal idea. What follows are disconnected sentences with little meaning."

Michael Morreau, who teaches philosophy at the University of Maryland, says: "In logic, the sentence is the basic bearer of truth or falsity. I say: It is raining. I use a sentence to provide information about what the world is like around here."

People who don't write and speak in coherent sentences, Morreau says, don't succeed in communication. He is especially concerned about "the death of the good sentence" -- one that imparts clear and concise information.

"It seems pretty obvious and uncontentious that you have got to be able to use sentences to make logical arguments," says James Cargile, who teaches logic at the University of Virginia.

Take a fragment such as: Sad, the king of France. It could mean the king is sad or it could mean it is sad to be the king. Two very different things.

Rifle through the Internet, and you find lots of examples of sentence fragging:

Mark A. Whatley, a psychology professor at Valdosta State University, posted a sampling of bad college-level writing.

"So was true in this study," wrote one student.

"Also, the study including finding out if males were more attracted to tall attractive females or short attractive females," wrote another.

University of Delaware professor Ben Yagoda has been teaching English for 16 years. Students, he says, are getting brighter. But their abilities to write clearly have deteriorated appreciably in the past four or five years.

Most prose that young people read nowadays, Yagoda says, is unedited -- blogs, text messages and instant messages. Consequently, "the things that suffer most are spelling and punctuation. They put a comma, not a period, where there is a pause."