Writing 101

I was always bothered with the assessment of "good writing" as separate from the body of thought behind writing. It seems perfectly acceptable to test-graders that the author has nothing meaningful to say, if he conveys his words with elegance and style.

On the other hand, I always attributed the merit of writing with the conveyance of thought. You are trying to explain a (hopefully original) idea. The meaning you are trying to express sets the maximum score, and the clarity and efficiency of your translation turning a brain process into a representation in language determines how much of that potential you reach. Or perhaps multiplies its value?

Doing neat tricks and performing back-flips with prose doesn't impress me. Empty calories don't satisfy. If at the end of a pretty and flavorful exposition, if the only understanding I got out of it was "Hi, How are you? I'm fine, and you?", then I would rate the latter sentence in favor of the well-written fluff. It is more efficient. It suits the content of its words, fits like a glove. Wearing a long elegant gown looks nice, but it's weird if you're in line at McDonald's. Dress for the occasion. Also true of writing.

But that is not the teaching criteria for standardized assessment of writing. You are not graded on your ideas or thoughts, merely on how you exposition them.

The result is a meaningless aggravatingly pointless train of thought, protected with a checklist of pirouettes and plies. Turn of phrase, +2, use of simile, +1, stylistic variation, +3, balanced sentence structure, +1, precise adjectives and adverbs, +1, subjective mastery of language arts, +15. It feels like getting my oil changed at a Jiffy-Lube, by a bunch of Master's students or underpaid English professors, probing my literary body with their greasy, grimy red pens while checking to see if my left and right blinkers work.

But in the end, the largest deciding factor is whether the reader culturally and subjectively appreciates my work. Reminds me of Bart Simpson becoming smart after taking medication and he tells his attention deficient classmates to return to work, "Come on people, this poetry isn't going to appreciate itself." It takes both the author and the reader to make literature meaningful.

Part of the exchange and cooperation between reader and writer is the shared common experience and understanding that the words are trying to call forth and touch upon, that the writer is attempting to direct upon a stage of language. If two people cannot understand each other at the cultural level, their words become misinterpreted or ineffectual. That's not to say either agent is at fault. It's the gap between two realms of experience that impede effective communication.

So how do you standardize assessment of an exchange that occurs between two culturally different individuals? They try to have two or three people grade each writer. But they use the same metrics to measure, so that doesn't really eliminate the systematic bias. They want graders who are capable of following their checklist and adhere to the same set of procedures.

It's like the jury system, where jurors are not instructed to judge based on their own thinking but only on the evidence and arguments presented by respective lawyers. And lawyers tend to dismiss potential jurors who are "renegades" that form opinions based on their own thinking, those jurors are unpredictable and therefore dangerous. They select people who think what they are told to, and are biased in their favor, individuals they feel can be swayed to their argument more easily.

The test makers don't want to consistently have two drastically different grader opinions on the same piece of writing. That would demonstrate that their grading criteria is flawed. So they will "preen" their graders to "objectively" grade papers using their biased methodology. And they will dismiss graders who don't conform to criteria they set, claiming those who consistently form opinions different from their peers are biased.

(It's a reversal of right and wrong, claiming that which is wrong is right and vice versa. Thucydides via Quentin Skinner translation, "When civil war breaks out, the first casualty is moral language for their partisan purpose.")

Many students have trouble writing when they sit down to it. I think the trouble isn't not knowing what to write. It's students don't know what to think. They are not taught how to form ideas or assess their own thoughts in Writing class.

I believe Thought is the most important and at its essence the one and only purpose of writing. If education on writing was focused on developing thoughts, the words would naturally find their way to paper. Alas, we have no Thinking class so what we have is a Writing class that teaches form without content, words without meaning.