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Bloggers or High Schoolers, Where is the Literary Talent?
word munger writes "A few weeks ago, Chad Orzel read a New York Times article which analyzed the best high school writing on the new SAT test. The Times' writer appeared surprised that the best high school writing was so bad. Chad then wondered if the best bloggers could do any better under the same conditions and it was put to the test. Over 500 people tried the timed online test, but just 109 scoreable responses resulted. Professionals graded all the responses which were then posted on a web site where readers can rate the essays themselves, as well as find out the professional score. So who's a better writer, a blogger or a high schooler? You can also read Chad's analysis — or better yet, you can decide for yourself."
Just hazarding a guess, but I think one of these groups might have a class or two which covers essay writing for things such as the SAT, and a hint is that it's not the Bloggers.
For alot of Bloggers, High School (much less College) was quite a long time ago, and most employers aren't quite as pedantic as English Teachers are.
On a related note, on our 'Advanced English Comp' exam that all Juniors have to take at our College you get to make 3 mistakes or you have to take the English Comp course. No, I dont mean 3 major mistakes, I mean anything wrong gets counted against you. For example in this writeup alone, I'm sure I have more then 3 mistakes with comma usage alone, much less any of the other writing conventions.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
The damn test gives 25 minutes to write a coherent well-thought out essay. Samuel Johnson wouldn't have been able to bang out a readable essay in twenty-five freaking minutes. Nabokov would have taken one look at the time limit, laughed, and then walked out. 25 minutes, holy crap. Are the people who come up with these tests insane?
For more on the reliability of SAT essay questions as a measure of anything except the ability to pile on verbage, here's an excerpt from another NYT article that ran last year:
"In March, Les Perelman attended a national college writing conference and sat in on a panel on the new SAT writing test. Dr. Perelman is one of the directors of undergraduate writing at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He did doctoral work on testing and develops writing assessments for entering M.I.T. freshmen. He fears that the new 25-minute SAT essay test that started in March - and will be given for the second time on Saturday - is actually teaching high school students terrible writing habits...
In the next weeks, Dr. Perelman studied every graded sample SAT essay that the College Board made public. He looked at the 15 samples in the ScoreWrite book that the College Board distributed to high schools nationwide to prepare students for the new writing section. He reviewed the 23 graded essays on the College Board Web site meant as a guide for students and the 16 writing 'anchor' samples the College Board used to train graders to properly mark essays.
He was stunned by how complete the correlation was between length and score. 'I have never found a quantifiable predictor in 25 years of grading that was anywhere near as strong as this one,' he said. 'If you just graded them based on length without ever reading them, you'd be right over 90 percent of the time.' The shortest essays, typically 100 words, got the lowest grade of one. The longest, about 400 words, got the top grade of six. In between, there was virtually a direct match between length and grade."
So to any high schoolers about to take the SAT: when in doubt, write a lot, in third-person, and in cursive.
In the U.S. educational system there is currently a very strong bias towards math. Since math skills are so essential, school systems are willing to overlook problems with reading and writing as long as a student is progressing well in algebra, calculus, geometry, etc. The reverse never seems to be the case, however. A student proficient in math who has trouble reading and writing is "gifted", while a student proficient in reading and writing who struggles through math lessons is "special".
One will get you a pass, so-to-speak, and another limits your academic horizons significantly.
Having problems in either subject will likely result in problems down the line in higher education and the Real World, but a complete lack of verbal and written skills is often not enough to force educators to pay closer attention.
Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
'I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.'
-- Booker T. Washington
Assignment: What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
The quote was not about accomplishment, it was about position. Those words have different meanings.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
The reason people think shakespeare is high literature is that nobody really understands it well enough to get the dirty jokes. If they actually knew what he was saying, they'd ban it.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Speaking as a professional writer and magazine editor, I suspect that this is one of the things that holds more people back from becoming good writers. They look at their "finished" product -- their first draft -- and they think it's pretty much OK, maybe has a few flaws, and they plan to do better next time. They don't stop to think that they might be able to do better this time if they would just put the manuscript on a shelf for a day or two, give it a rest, then revisit it with a nice big blue Pilot G2 pen and start self-editing and rewriting. And that, most importantly, there is absolutely no shame in not doing it "perfect" ths first time around. Many professional writers will tell you that the process of rewriting actually takes longer than the process of writing, especially on longer manuscripts. My recommendation is, whatever it is you plan to write, give yourself an artificial deadline a little before you have to turn it in and plan to do some self-editing and rewriting during that time. I find that just sleeping on it for a night usually gives you enough time to revisit your work with fresh eyes.
Breakfast served all day!
The second that any standardized test stops measuring ability & starts measuring knowledge.. you end up with teachers who teach to the test.
The Law School Aptitude Test is a good example of a standardized test that measures ability and not knowledge. The MCAT is a good example of a standardized test that mostly measures knowledge and not ability.
P.S. Kids don't have to take those standardized tests in lower/middle/high(?) school
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
The way I learned this essay-writing formula was:
Paragraph 1 : Argument (I will prove...)
Sentences : General statement, more specific statement, more specific statement, make point.
Paragraphs 2-4 : Reason with multiple supporting statements/sources. (An example is.... Because...)
Sentences : State reason, support reason (as needed), restate reason
Paragraph 5 : Restate argument (I have proved...)
Sentences : Restate point, more general statement, more general statement, closing statement.
Being taught only that in high school, there was a small learning curve when I hit college...
Big! Strong! Wow! Tada-O!
I know to say 'on which side the bread is buttered'. I know that saying 'to boldly go' is wrong, but the correct structure changes the meaning.
In English, there's nothing wrong with splitting an infinitive, or with putting a preposition at the end of a clause. The prohibition against splitting infinitives is particularly ridiculous; it comes from a perceived need to make the grammar of English more similar to the grammar of Latin, in which infinitives are a single word, and therefore can't be split.
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