MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH STUDENTS-as well as everything responsible I have seen in print-confirms the steep decline in what, for want of a more discriminating term, is called language skills, particularly as manifest in cogent expository writing on the broad standard level of usage. Reading comprehension of sophisticated texts-a subtler, more complicated, if related matter-aside, college writing is the issue of our greatest concern. Competent writing is the most tangible mark of functional literacy, a nebulous term that I define simply as the verbal capability assuring academic and professional success. As the findings of my capsule experiment indicate, student writing may be substandard on grounds more basic than grammatical sufficiency or rhetorical effectiveness. Further, they show that the fundamental problem not only is collegiate, but is shared by professionals in educated society at large. There has been no end of speculation as to the imputed causes of writing deficiency these days. Most of it is inflamed polemic, squint-eyed and hobby-ridden. The general question has roused a furor during the past ten years. Critics, poets, novelists, editorialists, pedagogues, philologists, linguists, and historians keep firing off their partial-often contradictory-answers. There is seldom hard evidence in these broadsides, written indignantly, as Dorothy Parker said of a book, fear and without research. However, the accelerated decay of language, apparent in school and beyond, is more widely deplored than slum rot. Bureaucratic gobbledygook, journalese (Newspeak), law jargon, education school and social science Choctaw, the bafflegab lingo of criticism in the various arts-as well as every form of what Mary Renault called withitry-are insistently, incessantly denounced. To what effect? Actually, little. It seems to me, however, that so far as diction is concerned-and that is the topic I have fixed on-the most glaring aberrations do not involve jargoneering, whether derived from these or related sources. After all, cant terms, nonce words, and jargon (are they distinguishable?) are merely vacuous, pretentious, or dreary ephemera. They have always smogged the air we breathe. But though they impede, they do not utterly rupture communication. Lifestyle, establishment, identity crisis, vis-a-vis, stance, ghetto, paranoia, on-going, interface, low profile, meaningful, hermeneutic, into (for