Donald Clarke: On some testing Leaving Cert questions

The most remarkable thing about this week’s Leaving Certificate papers is, perhaps, that thousands of citizens with no personal involvement have some idea as to their content. Like a collective meddling mother, the Irish media has always paid bizarrely close attention to the contents of each exam. Did you read the paper properly? Did you remember to write your name clearly?

Caringly destructive in the manner of most parents, we will drone on incessantly about the minutiae of the questions and then finish off by saying – in a voice pregnant with insincerity – that it isn’t the end of the world if you fail. No, really. The sound of mountains falling into boiling seas is of no consequence.

Anyway, as a result of this national obsession, childless columnists who sat the exam when Tenpole Tudor were in the charts are aware of what was in the opening exam.

It all sounds very quaint. English Paper 1 featured a piece of prose from a "pop star": Bono out of U2. In my day, this would have been about as likely as encountering a letter from Penthouse's Readers' Wives section. Never fear. There was also a passage from the eminently respectable Penelope Lively and a piece from the Guardian on supernatural literature in a secular age.

What really catches the eye, however, is the composition section. This really is the place to offer advice on honing contemporary life skills. At no stage in the past century have young people been quite so engaged with constructing quite so much everyday prose. Thirty years ago, a chap could spend a month without writing much more than his name at the bottom of a cheque. Out there in contemporary teenage hell, the thumbs are flying over miniature keyboards in a permanent whirl of composition.

What’s this? The students were asked to write a letter to a school principal complaining about his or her decision not to hold a graduation event. There was also the option of writing an address to the United Nations. To be fair (and briefly serious), both seem like perfectly decent – if dry – tests of comprehension and communication skills. After all, any young person who grasps the meaning of the word “letter” is clearly a master of the obsolete.

None of this, however, does much to prepare the candidate for the rigours of modern writing. Rather than teaching the young person how to write a letter to an offending principal, should we not be explaining the most efficient way of poisoning his or her reputation in foul bursts of fewer than 140 characters?

Extra marks could be awarded for submissions that imply some sexual peccadillo that – though entirely made-up – proves very hard to disprove without taking to a court of law.

Foolish students

Foolish students who have mastered the art of the semi-colon will be marked down in favour of those whose unhinged contempt is reflected in the bloody linguistic stumps that comprise their spittle-flecked compositions. Something in the style of “Like Cromwell, I beseech you think it possible that you may be mistaken” will edge the student towards a C grade. What about: “u fat perv, I no where u live. Youre monky face is going to hell”? Now, we’re looking at a B.

To achieve the highest mark, the writer must, however, be shown to have mastered casual bigotry and to have honed an ability to reduce all arguments to ad hominem abuse.

Remember, when objecting to published comments on film or music, to place both “critic” and “review” in withering inverted commas. This approach never fails to win the grudging admiration of the “critic” who wrote the “review”. Also, no comments section beneath any newspaper column is complete without somebody wondering: “Why is this news?” You might like to try it here.

The most fertile generators of half-baked, toxic commentary are articles that, however obliquely, touch on feminist issues. Indeed, the mere fact of the author being a woman is enough to call up the darkest forces of online vituperation.

A useful Leaving Cert question might present such a piece and invite the student to find novel ways of making the author feel fearful for her life and uncomfortable in her own skin. Boorish, irrelevant commentary on the writer’s appearance will also stir approval in the examiner.

Atavistic instinct

Oh, don’t mind my facetiousness. So degraded is the worst of online communication that it requires no training and profits little from textual analysis. This stuff springs from the same atavistic instinct that causes only mildly psychopathic humans to kick cats and push passing eccentrics into puddles. It hardly matters, anyway. If a recent report is to be believed, we’ll all be writing in Emojis by the middle of the century.

Sad face. Angry Face. Little man with head buried despairingly in hands.