more practice writing than speaking. My best example is a History class I took at the U here a few years ago. It was a 400 level class with several hours of History as a prerequisite called Seminar on the Holocaust. It was an elective, so nobody had to be there. There were thirty and change students; myself and a couple of other adults and the remainder were upper division college students in their late teens, early twenties. Not half of them could have put the Holocaust in WWII, WWII in the right century, nor told you who the major participants and leaders were.

The tasks were to choose a theme, read three books consistent with that theme, write a not less than twenty page paper on that theme, and give a ten minute precis of the paper to the class. Most of them spent more than half the semester trying to come up with a theme and a proposal that the professor would accept (and he was anything but a demanding professor). No more than three or four of them could actually do the ten minutes precis in any organized and articulate fashion. None of them really had a true beginning, middle, and end. The young men mostly mumbled and hemmed and hawed for three or four minutes and sat down. The young women sang their disorganized messes much like the young woman in the video. The Ed Majors, male and female, all came equipped with graphic aids and note cards then went on and on for fifteen or twenty minutes until the prof put them out of their misery for lack of time. All were colloquial and ungrammatical. It was one of the more painful things I’ve ever witnessed but I sat through it out of morbid fascination all the while thanking my stars that I don’t have to rely on Social Security and these people’s earning power in my old age.

In the later days of my career with the State, most of my subordinates were young lawyers. Even they had a terrible time with hearings because they weren’t particularly articulate or quick on their feet. They knew the law and were good at analysis and writing, but they’d had little or no training in oral argument or in conducting adversarial hearings. They could write you a nice memo on relevance or probative value, but they couldn’t quickly make a relevance objection and then explain why they did it. I spent a LOT of time making them do mock hearings before they got sent into real ones.