If you’ve been wondering why the standards of writing have declined in recent years…
…wonder no more. Some time ago, the teaching of writing liberated itself from the surly bonds of clarity, rules, and white oppression (is that redundant?) and escaped to touch the face of diversity and self-expression.
Now, huge numbers of writing teachers are dedicated to those latter two principles, as the agenda at a large conference recently sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (hey, at least they haven’t jettisoned alliteration) demonstrates:
…[P]anels focused on everything but the written word as traditionally understood. Offerings stressed civic engagement, multi-media, sustainability and “eco-composition,” multilingualism, student self-assessment, student extra-curricular experiences, student “engagement,” cross-disciplinarity, hip-hop, Native American traditions and languages, digital storytelling, “queer rhetorics,” “feminist rhetorics,” “visual rhetorics”””and all the usual ethnic grievance communities: Chicano, African-American, indigenous, etc.
Politics is not just covertly present in almost every aspect of the conference and its workshops, it is overtly present as well. And the politics is, as one might expect, that of the left.
Mary Grabar, author of the piece on the conference, and an English instructor in Atlanta, writes:
My own work duties as an instructor of composition forced me to miss a paper on “Tea Party Rage” on Thursday afternoon. But after sleeping off the headache induced by all the drumming, I was at the Atlanta Marriott to attend the Friday 8:00 a.m. session “’Unrelated Kin’: Building Kin Relationships with Critical Race Theory and Out-Loud Public Literacies in Rhetoric-Composition Studies.” Here again a presumed “critical thinking” was applied against the teacher’s political enemy to engage students in protest “action.” Panelist Jody Ludlow advocated using “critical race theory” to expose what she claims is the promotion of “white privilege under the false veil of fairness,” in the language of Nebraska’s Initiative 424 against affirmative action. But through the example of Ludlow and approximately 95 percent of conference participants, it became clear that one must condemn one’s own “white privilege” to be allowed a place at the CCCC table.
The entire article makes for depressing reading. It’s not that this sort of thing was previously unknown; anyone who follows education (and anyone who has read Allan Bloom’s over-twenty-year-old work The Closing of the American Mind) is well aware that these trends have been going on for decades. But the extent of the claptrap, the details of the indoctrination, and the dominance of this sort of approach are still sobering and shocking to read.
A personal note about teaching on the elementary (rather than college) level: I received a very old-fashioned education, even for its time (50s and 60s), in the public schools of New York City. My teachers were uniformly old, and they taught writing and grammar as it was taught at the turn of the century (the twentieth, that is).
We diagrammed sentences till the cows came home. The teachers were tough and it was boring. Rules were rules. Self-esteem was something to be laboriously earned through performance. And diversity merely furnished the ingredients for the soupy melting pot out of which an American identity would be forged.
But by the time I had grown up and was a parent myself, there were rumblings of a kinder, gentler education. At the time it took the form of what was called invented spelling.
The idea was that children would do better at writing if their natural urge to express themselves was not bogged down by such extraneous baggage as rules, at least at the beginning. Later on, precision would come. But in the beginning it was all about freedom and feeling good about oneself and the writing process.
I never bought it. Somehow, generations earlier had managed to learn how to write properly without being unduly stifled. Why encourage bad habits? It seemed logical to suppose that, if children continually practice poor spelling and grammar, it will become more entrenched, and research bears up the fact that traditional spelling instruction is better.
Spelling is just the tip of the iceberg, though. Far more important is the neglect of the classics, the demonization of the old dead white men (and a few women) who wrote so many of them, and the elevation of diversity for diversity’s sake. Those trends seem to be going stronger than ever, and have borne political fruit.
sponsored by the Conference on College Composition and Communication (hey, at least they haven’t jettisoned alliteration)
They missed a further alliteration. Should have read “Communist Conference on College Composition and Communication.”
More accurate, too.
civic engagement, multi-media, sustainability and “eco-composition,” multilingualism, student self-assessment, student extra-curricular experiences, student “engagement,” cross-disciplinarity, hip-hop, Native American traditions and languages, digital storytelling, “queer rhetorics,” “feminist rhetorics,” “visual rhetorics”–and all the usual ethnic grievance communities: Chicano, African-American, indigenous, etc.
Hard to believe that this wouldn’t lead to some first-rate scholarship.
“Building Kin Relationships with Critical Race Theory and Out-Loud Public Literacies in Rhetoric-Composition Studies”
What the heck does that even mean? It seems like whenever I read the title of some paper or lecture in academia is is similarly incoherent. Do they really believe this word salad makes them sound smarter?
More likely the wordiness and dependence on academic jargon is a way to impress each other and identify themselves as a group member.
“The idea was that children would do better at writing if their natural urge to express themselves was not bogged down by such extraneous baggage as rules. . . .”
and what one winds up with under those circumstances is someone such as Nell (see the movie with Jodie Foster, Liam Neeson and Natasha Richardson), raised in the woods, having developed her own Nell-speak and incapable of communicating with anyone outside of her own narrowly defined world. Diversity, indeed.
Neo, sounds like you and I went to the same schools just several hundred miles apart.
Neo,
All of what you say is depressing enough. I read a textbook about essay writing my daughter used in the California Community College system. The sample essays and commentary would have been welcome at the CCCC. Andrew Sullivan was one of the featured essayists – “Why the M-word (marraige) matters to me”.
Here’s a piece from City Journal about recently educated people who are actually writing in attempt to be understood. It’s lightly humorous and depressing at the same time.
http://www.city-journal.com/2011/21_1_snd-american-english.html
I have two degrees in English Lit, and a state teaching credential. I spent the better part of March and April scoring California state mandated high school essays.
More than 80% of the essays I read (and I read nearly 3000) received substandard scores. The essays were from all over the state and encompassed every economic and ethnic group. The vast majority of today’s high school students regardless of background, race, or affluence simply do not know how to write coherent sentences, much less compile them into logical paragraphs, and forming an essay with a thesis, supporting paragraphs and a conclusion is completely beyond them.
I grew up in the midwest in the early 1970s. I was taught the parts of speech, sentence diagramming, and proper essay construction until I could nearly do it in my sleep. Whomever has taught today’s California high school students has colossally, horribly betrayed them by deliberately leaving them incapable of communicating coherently in writing.
Ironically, many of the students’ essays contained rhetoric about the importance of being “green,” diversity and multiculturalism–none of which were germane to the essay prompt. But someone’s taught them that crap well enough that they can regurgitate the concepts…though they can’t do it in coherent sentences.
Never before have I believed that “those who can’t do, teach,” but when it comes to the English language I am forced to believe that cliche is true.
Let’s say a parent wants her kid to learn to write well and let’s say there’s no such thing as public (government-run, taxpayer-funded) school. Never in a million years would she hire someone to teach her kid any of this crap.
I bet none of those writing teachers are real writers who could write and sell something that wasn’t required reading.
Learning correct english is an example of white male privelege and we can’t have that. Grammar is just a way of exploiting women, minorities and gays.
I had the same old-fashioned grammar and diagramming education. I was always intimidated by creative writing and term papers, I think because I subconsciously realized that I didn’t know what I was talking about. It was only after college as I started to experience a wider world first hand that I became more confident about writing. I worked for years editing medical and scientific papers using the skills I learned diagramming sentences.
A six year old should not be encouraged to recommend environmental or social policy. All they have to bring to the discussion are feelings. They probably realize this on some level and therefore stick to group think for protection. The result may be an effective Obama campaign, but it does little for us when we have complex issues before us.
As to the alliterative conference: Paul Ryan, here is a place to save taxpayers’ money.
Good alternative title, Occam – I was also thinking that CCCP would be a more accurate acronym than their chosen CCCC.
Educating Americans has morphed into a jobs program for idiots.
A little irony here; these teachers will be dependent on their pupils to pay the taxes that will fund the teacher’s retirement. I wonder how that will be??
Gads, what a flock of incoherant nutbars … I got a good education too – just before the public schools started whoring after academic trendy junk like see-say whole-word reading, and the New Math. I fled academia without a backword look, upon getting a degree in English, and went straight into the military, where the writing I was expected to do was clear, concise, correct and communicated a message to an audience.
I took one education class, almost by accident, when I was finishing up requirements for my degree – and that cured me once and forever of any desire to qualify as a public school teacher.
Communists infiltrated our educational system and one of their loved programs/ideology is “critical thinking.” As with all things communist, the title is double-speak. Critical thinking is merely the method of obedience. Any student looking at any subject of study finds what the teacher points to (injustice) and the solution will be anti-traditional, anti-American and anti-freedom.
To see how one starts with Socrates and ends us with John Dewey, peruse the following article.
http://www.criticalthinking.org/aboutCT/briefHistoryCT.cfm
Exerpt:
“We now recognize that critical thinking, by its very nature, requires, for example, the recognition that all reasoning occurs within points of view and frames of reference.”
I’ve watched over the years, the English Department, oh excuse me… it’s now the Literatures in English Department, morph from a standard English department to the typical PC, communist cabal.
There’s one fellow left, who is regarded by the students as the best teacher on campus. He’s a classic liberal. He’s now a pariah in his own department, because what he really wants to do is teach James Joyce, and help the students develop their writing. Why the commies focused their energies on English departments, I’m not sure, but they certainly have had a great deal of success.
Sgt. Mom
I agree with you on whole language versus phonics. Phonics involves a lot of drill and repetition. Adults hate drills and repetition but young children like them. How many times does a young child like to be read the SAME BOOK? Many times, in many cases. Whole language instruction was designed as if children think and learn like adults- which they don’t.
New Math wasn’t for everyone, and many mis-taught it. Many who taught New Math thought that traditional skills in multiplication, division, addition and subtraction should be thrown out. . One of my math professors related a conversation he had had with Max Beberman the creator of the University of Illinois “New Math” (UICSM) program that I learned in high school. Max told my prof that tossing out those traditional computational skills had not been not his intent. Others had misinterpreted him.
I had a solid grounding in traditional computational math before I hit Illinois Math (UICSM) in 9th grade. Before 9th grade, I did well in Math but found it boring. I found Illinois Math exciting. Instead of doing boring computations all day, we did a lot of proofs. Those proofs assisted me in doing computations in my head, as the distributive, associative, and commutative principles helped me break down computations and make estimates a lot faster.
Several decades out of high school, I took a Linear Algebra course that was almost all proofs. Over half the class got Ds or Fs. I breezed through it, thanks to all the proofs from Illinois Math in high school.
New Math was not for everyone. A lot of my fellow students didn’t like it. But it was definitely for me and my sister. I had a very bad math teacher in 9th grade, a family friend who attended my mother’s funeral, but the Illinois Math textbook was so good I taught myself, and liked it.
What would you do if one year all the plumbers decided that their real job was not giving us working pipes but making sure that our homes and businesses had fashionable floral sprays and day-gro light bulbs?
I’m fortunate in that I write fairly well without having suffered much for it in school. But I’ve been an eager reader since I learned how, and I often chose good models. My teachers encouraged it, and a few were skeptical at first of how much I read. Advantages like these grow rarer today.
Why the commies focused their energies on English departments, I’m not sure, but they certainly have had a great deal of success.
They may have chosen to penetrate English departments because:
it’s squishy (the merit of a piece being a matter of taste), so choosing texts and grading essays can be done on political grounds and yet defended,
it’s a core subject a lot of students have to take in one capacity or another, thus providing a large catchment area,
it was already full of liberals (the tweed jacket with elbow patches set) who wouldn’t resist a Red infestation, and who outwardly wore their shabby gentility as a badge of honor, but inwardly resented that their great intellects were not appreciated,
it has natural appeal to wannabe intellectuals (who delight in pontificating about incredibly obscure authors, and therefore without fear of successful contradiction),
it’s intrinsically less unpopular than, e.g., math, physics, or (ahem) chemistry, so potential inculcatees (pardon the neologism) are more open to being charmed, and last,
it’s easier to infest an existing department than to create a grievance studies department, and its requisite sinecures for agitators, out of whole cloth.
The plumber’s metaphor is good, njcommuter. For one, it points to the disaster that inevitably results, and it also suggests the quite illogical motivation divorced from reality. One might then look at the need to sustain the disaster with deception and force.
I am of the opinion that you can’t teach “real” writing because it is the end result of the other skills of grammar, reading and thinking. Sure, you teach the models (which a true writer would spot anyway) and provide constructive criticism, but a true writer can’t help but write. May God pity him.
Chief Justice Roberts was probably saved from a writing career.
http://articles.cnn.com/2008-10-14/justice/roberts.mystery.writer_1_high-court-dissent-appeal?_s=PM:CRIME
I just had another thought on this. People should be taught to appreciate literature, but this doesn’t mean all should be expected to produce it. I don’t want the instruction manual for an appliance to be creatively written, and I bet most people would prefer tax forms to be boring but clear. Scientific and medical writing and international trade agreements should also be clearly and logically written. Yet the self expressive and creative side of writing seems to have higher status, and when this thinking infects early education, rules are degraded.
OMT, Amazon.de just sent notices of Kindle offerings now available in Germany. They had 2 side by side lists of top offerings in English: one was current best sellers and the other was was free downloads. The latter included translations from Greek and Russian as well as English and American classics from Shakespeare to Twain, Austin, and Darwin. Imagine what this development can mean to young people across the world, some of whom started out in school rooms without desks. It’s good to know that Tom Friedman thought Amazon would be a flop.
These anything-goes education people don’t know how provincial they are when they attack the foundations of our language. Think what websites like Khan Academy can do for worldwide education if people can access it via English. English may have come about as a world language via trade and empires, but it now opens the world to so many. Rather than apologizing for our sins, we have a responsibility to treasure and preserve the language and to pass it on to our own children.
“Why the commies focused their energies on English departments, I’m not sure, but they certainly have had a great deal of success.”
I’d second Occam’s Beard and add:
Because they aren’t all stupid. When you can exert control over language, you can exert control over thought.
If you can grade an essay and give your impressionable young student a terrible grade based based on their politically incorrect opinion while convincing them they simply have more to “learn”, you are well on your way to successfully indoctrinating another Fellow Traveler.
This is not the only feature. If you start young enough, you get to make sure that by the time your students are adults, most, if not all of the individuals that disagree with the doctrine, won’t be able to effectively communicate why they disagree.
All they will have is a vague feeling of wrongness they won’t have the skill or vocabulary to describe. But the people who do agree will be well versed in the code and will use it regularly to identify like-minded people.
For example:
“Building Kin Relationships with Critical Race Theory and Out-Loud Public Literacies in Rhetoric-Composition Studies…”
If you have to ask what it means, you ain’t part of the club.
Neo says, “Self-esteem was something to be laboriously earned through performance. And diversity merely furnished the ingredients for the soupy melting pot out of which an American identity would be forged.”
The good old days.
I had a fractured educational experience as a youth. I began in the California public school system up to age 13, and at that time (early 1980’s) it wasn’t too bad.
In other words, it wasn’t larded with PC gobbledygook, it was something more basic: the beginning of the erosion of standards. I didn’t get a lot of homework, and I cakewalked thought the whole elementary school experience.
I remember in particular my fourth grade year, where my teacher (poetically named “Mr. Low”) let me and two Korean kids sit out normal class exercises because we were writing and illustrating our own (inept) comic books. Why? Encourage creativity.
That all changed when I entered seventh grade in a stern private school (uniforms and all) in Florida. In English it was read, read, read, and diagram sentences until your face turns purple.
I was horrible at it, and I wasn’t used to doing homework. So I rebelled and did nothing. The teacher called my dad and said I was going to fail, and he told me I had either to get my grades up or stop playing basketball.
I learned the lesson. Without it, I would certainly be like one of the 80% of kids RandomThoughts mentioned – unable to pen a coherent sentence, with nary a thought that isn’t somehow a product of indoctrination.
Theodore Dalrymple has written a lot about the soul-destroying effects of a failure to learn how to use language. Any thoughts one might have about what causes what, or what things mean, or more fundamentally how one’s life might be conceived as a whole with a direction and a purpose, become extremely difficult, if not impossible, to articulate. The result is an imprisonment in a world that is present-oriented and aimlessly adrift. Frustration follows, then anger. It’s not hard to see why so many of the pseudo-educated in college and elsewhere would latch onto the simplicities and slogans of PC. It provides the decayed articulation for a decayed sense of purpose.
PC is the ghost of departed significance.
Well, this puts this clip from Big Bang Theory in to a different context. Oh, the humanities, indeed.
Now the real question is, is this the way writing is taught in the Ivy league, in the schools that aren’t geared toward producing the cattle.
“Now the real question is, is this the way writing is taught in the Ivy league, in the schools that aren’t geared toward producing the cattle.”
JKB, I’m not clear on what you mean, but if you mean what I think this sentence means I say the Ivy League is geared towards producing the sheep that wears the bell. (The sheep that wears the bell is the alpha female and all females follow her, and because all the females follow her, all the males follow the females.)
Language is the instrument of thought. (Try thinking without it.)
Naturally, the Reds would want to break that instrument.
Broken language, crippled minds: easily fooled, easily led.
I’m an English major, Vanderbilt, 1979. I grew up in the Carolinas, and you’d better believe our (public) schools had us drilling in grammar from grades 1 – 12. And diagramming sentences, yessirree! But you know how antediluvian Southerners are.
Also, I believe it was Orwell (as usual) who noticed this trend with his analysis of “NewSpeak,” and said that its purpose was not only to muddle thought, but to make it impossible to think “incorrect” thoughts.
He also pointed out that the commies call everything by its opposite, and quite brazenly.
As a secret tweed-jacket-with-leather-jacket kind of a guy, I read Grabar’s piece with amusement mingled with despair. Amusement because of the childishness and fecklessness of the professoriate. Despair because these children are vicious. William Golding, call your office.
Beverly, they need to keep some of us English majors around. I rejoice in the knowledge that when we get to Galt’s Gulch, Parker and Occam’s Beard will be pressing golden pennies into my hand and begging for more epic blank verse about the fall of the looters.
Leftism is a substitute for religion, of the most obscurantist and provincial kind. Just as in a religious curriculum in religious schools, where every subject must be related to worship, so, too, Leftism. The all-embracing arms of the ideology is inherited from its earlier, more primitive forms of Nazism (where all studies related to racial theory) and Communism (where all studies related to Marxism).
That is why Leftism will win. It is (alas) the modern parallel to the Roman World succumbing to Christianity. It also explains Leftism’s attraction to another totalizing ideology, Islam, which adds to Leftism its final justification after racial justice, social justice, and economic justice: allah’s justice.
There is a dark age ahead in which whole societies abandon reason for ignorance (all conclusions are known, dictated by ideology), poverty (all Socialisms are anti-Capitalist) and brutal racism (“acting white,” “white man’s greed,” “peace through the elimination of Israel,” etc.
And the people of America and Europe long for it.
Yo…… Hey eboniks…..u b long livin’
I recommend the collected essays of the late Richard Mitchell, professor at a college of education a decade or so ago. Many of these essays were originally published in his _Underground Grammarian_, later in several books, most of which are available for free download in many formats at http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~torsten/ug/
Dr. Mitchell bequeathed his essays to the public.
While his own prose _sometimes_ got a trifle turgid, for the most part the essays are deliciously sarcastic, as when he’s publishing and commenting on letters of complaint he had received from teachers disliking what he had said. One of those letters referred to a “porseffor of Eglinsh” in attempting to state why high school teachers shouldn’t teach rules of grammar, spelling, and the like.
Just to make it clear, Mitchell often said he was not against teachers generally, many of whom did good work. He was especially harsh with schools and departments of education, and of school administration.
Ayn Rand wrote an essay about modern education in 1970 entitled “The Comprachicos”. It is both chilling and prophetic.
I can’t find the text online, but it is included in the collection The New Left: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, and later reissued as Return of the Primitive.
Unfortunately, we’ve nearly quit educating Engineers in this country… I read recently we now graduate 7 lawyers for every Engineer. Now I understand why.
Seems that I’ll be employed forever, but will have to battle a phalanx of legal beagles to actually build anything… Sad, really, really sad…
“I rejoice in the knowledge that when we get to Galt’s Gulch, Parker and Occam’s Beard will be pressing golden pennies into my hand and begging for more epic blank verse about the fall of the looters…”
Hey, what about us scribblers of epic family sagas set on the American frontier which emphasize free will, hard work, open markets and American exceptionalism? (enable New York accent) What are we here, chopped liver? (disable New York accent.)
Actually, if I could modestly suggest pressing some golden pennies, or any other currency into my hand, via Amazon or Barnes & Noble … my very latest book is being launched this week, and I could use bigger royalty payments. And perhaps it might prove to you all that even if the academics have all gone bats**t crazy — when it comes to agreeable genre fiction, All Is NOT lost!
(Just search for Celia Hayes, or Daughter of Texas, or The Adelsverein Trilogy … also available as a Kindle or Nook version, too.)
Beverly, they need to keep some of us English majors around. I rejoice in the knowledge that when we get to Galt’s Gulch, Parker and Occam’s Beard will be pressing golden pennies into my hand and begging for more epic blank verse about the fall of the looters.
Full disclosure: In college at one juncture I briefly toyed with the notion of abandoning chemistry, my first love, and pursuing a career as a writer!
The root cause of civilizational decadence is always the same: reluctance to make children unhappy in any situation. Sorry, but it is impossible to educate children without disciplining, punishing and frustrating them. Every drill sergant knows it.
Today watched Euronews on illiteracy elimination program – the first part of the story was about some hell-hole in Africa, the second – about Washington, DC, where 30% of adults are functionally illiterate. If situation is really so bad, the very drastic measure is approriate: dissolve Department of Education, fire all elementary school teachers and replace them by Army and Mariners drill sergents. Add some Boys Scouts Masters. Only this can work.
A few days ago there was comment regarding the frustrating and non-disappearing reality of Jewish progressivism. I think of the number of great Jewish writers including Disraeli who said “when I want to read a novel, I write one,” and how much Talmud study has prepared, ironically, the educated idiots who think they are doing a great service for humanity, and I wonder how soon will be the day of their enlightenment.
http://comments.americanthinker.com/read/42323/809284.html
Parker, what I meant was that there is a distinct difference in what is taught at elite private prep schools and colleges from that inflicted on the masses. If these elite universities, such as Harvard, have degraded as much as this conference indicates other have, then we truly are lost.
My cousin works as a schoolteacher in Southern California, only as replacement when regular teachers are sick. Once he said to her class that they must study harder to get a good job when they grew up. The students complained that she was “terrorising” them. She was reprimanded by principal for such non-PC behavior and warned that they will fire her if get a new complaint.
The idea was that children would do better at writing if their natural urge to express themselves was not bogged down by such extraneous baggage as rules, at least at the beginning. Later on, precision would come.
This is remarkably like learning to shoot quickly and accurately.
You don’t go for speed first, with the idea that precision will eventually arrive.
You concentrate on doing it right each time.
With practice the speed (or in your case, the ability to express oneself) will increase naturally.
It seldom works very well the other way around.
–
OK, Sgt. Mom, I’m in. I’m just back from a business trip to San Antonio, so I am totally prepared to read a Texas frontier family saga.
Go, Sgt. Mom.
Thanks, Oblio – you won’t regret it, honestly, you won’t. The local librarians and book clubs that I have given talks to over the last year — they all love the Trilogy and say that there isn’t any more painless and more interesting way to get a handle on local history. Enjoy!
Concerning Sergey’s story, the point I take from that is chiefly that teachers are slaves of the unions. The unions don’t represent the will of the teachers. The unions represent the will of the evil Leftist alliance of money laundering extortion racketeering politicians and bureaucrats. It is a fig leaf that “unions” are to help the workers.
Thus when teachers say that they want more unions, I say to them that they don’t get a say in anything. They are either told what to do or they disobey and are excommunicated.
Words are easier to manipulate than actions. Case in point, no matter how many Leftists action groups are out on the streets, when I cut off someone’s head, that someone’s head is not going to get re-attached, their body resurrected, and be out walking due to “pressure” from the action groups.
Actions are often times harder to distort then illusionary words.
The Soviets were masters of illusion crafting first and foremost. When there wasn’t enough food, they created illusionary words that were almost as good as food. Rather than fixing the food supply and redistribution issue like a conservative would have.
the first part of the story was about some hell-hole in Africa, the second – about Washington, DC,
A distinction without a difference.
Shouldn’t that be “at least they haven’t abandoned alliteration”? 🙂
Some time ago, the teaching of writing liberated itself from the surly bonds of clarity, rules, and white oppression (is that redundant?) and escaped to touch the face of diversity and self-expression.
If you’d like the book from my last writing class, I’d be pleased to send it to you– it was about 2003, via Phoenix Online, and was such a load of bull that I pretty much wrote off using them for an English degree. I think you can get my email from my login. ^.^
OlderandWheezier Says:
April 22nd, 2011 at 3:25 pm
Good alternative title, Occam – I was also thinking that CCCP would be a more accurate acronym than their chosen CCCC.
You mean their “alternate accurate (simi) alliterative appellation’s acronym” would be….?