Could People *Ever* Write?

I teach legal writing, so I hear a lot from colleagues about the inadequate quality of student writing and how we're going to hell in a handbasket as a result. I'm not entirely convinced. At least, I'm not convinced we're going now. I think we've always been handbasketing to hell.

"If your children are attending college, the chances are that when they
graduate they will be unable to write ordinary, expository English with
any real degree of structure and lucidity."
--Merrill Sheils, Newsweek, 1975

Young people entering college suffer from "bad spelling, incorrectness
as well as inelegance of expression in writing, and ignorance of the
simplest rules of punctuation."
--Charles Eliott, Harvard president, 1871

"Already abundance of books makes men less studious; it destroys memory
and enfeebles the mind by relieving it of too much work."
--Hieronimo Squarciafico, 1477 (bemoaning the printing press)

As people rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge
they used to carry inside their heads, they will cease to exercise their
memory. They will be able to receive a quantity of information without
proper instruction and so be thought very knowledgeable when they are
for the most part quite ignorant.
--Socrates ~400 B.C.E. (paraphrased).

See Nicholas Carr, Is Google Making Us Stupid? Atlantic Monthly
(July/August 2008); Thanks to Wayne Schiess, University of Texas School of Law, for pointing me to this