Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom Author(s): Richard H. Haswell Source: College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 3 (Oct., 1988), pp. 303-315 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/357469 Accessed: 14/11/2009 21:41 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=ncte. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

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Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom

Richard H. Haswell The number of categories in holistic rating scales varies a good deal, from as few as three to as many as fifteen. What remains constant is the uniform way scorers conceive of the bottom-most cubicle. Essays settled there almost always have the highest concordance of scores assigned independently by raters, higher even than have the topmost essays. Apparently those performing holistic ratings-usually teachers of writing-agree better on who are bad writers than on who are good. This strikes me as a curiosity worth a closer look. Organizational Preferences of Writers Recently in this journal I reported on an analysis of the logical organization of impromptu essays written by freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in college and by workplace writers eight years or more out of college ("Organization"). The essays had been rated on a holistic scale of 1 up to 8 by seven young university writing instructors, averaging two-and-a-half years teaching composition in college and two years in the schools. Their assessment is a typical example of the way independent scorers tend to agree most on those essays they rate lowest. Out of ninety-six student essays, the nine with an average rate of 2 or lower had very little spread among their seven rates: three of these bottom-most essays received rates only of 1 and 2, five received rates of 1 to 3, and one rates of 1 to 4 (the mean standard deviation of their rates is 0.75). By comparison, of the nine top essays, all with an average rate of 7 or higher, five received rates of 6 to 8, three of 5 to 8, and one of 3 to 8 (the mean standard deviation of their rates is 1.06). It takes no more than a glance at the bottom nine essays to see one possible explanation for this difference of concurrence in assessment. The writing sample had tapped all composition classes at a land-grant university which, at the time, offered no special courses for students with severe writing problems. So it is no surprise to find these bottom essays displaying the characteristic feaRichard H. Haswell is a professor of English at Washington State University. He is currently working on a book-length study of writing development during the college years.

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tures of that kind of writing still sometimes labeled "remedial" or "incompetent." They are halt with mechanical errors, quirky in paragraphing, scant of title and topic sentence and introduction and supportive elaboration and other readeramenities, and backward in production, averaging 196 words compared to 364 for the higher-rated student essays. Perhaps "remedial" writing is easy for evaluators to categorize because it bears, or bares, its earmarks flagrantly, on the surface. What is totally a surprise is the showing of these "incompetent" essays in terms of my original analysis of organizational patterns. As Table 1 shows, compared to the eighty-seven student essays higher up in the scale, these nine basement essays performed more like the working-world essays, which had been authored by employees chosen precisely because their supervisors had deemed them "competent" writers. Table 1 Analysis of Organizational Patterns

Pattern

Logical Parts of Pattern

Student Writers Rated 3-8

Student Writers Workplace Rated 1-2 Writers

Collection Overlappingcategories Classification Mutuallyexclusivecategories Degree Categoriesthat rank Development Stagesthat evolvechronologically Comparison Categoriesthat compareor contrast Causation Causeand effect Process Procedureand goal Inference Premiseand conclusion

10 12 5

0 0 0

0 1 1

10

0

2

6 13 0 4

2 0 0 2

2 3 0 5

Choice

10

1

2

2 6 2

0 1 0

3 2 2

2

1

2

5 87

2 9

7 32

Solution Dialectic CausalChain Sorites Sequence

Options and final choice

Problemand resolution Antithesesand synthesis Chainingof causeand effect Chainingof premiseand conclusion Chainingof partsof different patterns

My earlier paper explains this particular measure of organization fully. Aspects relevant to the present discussion will become clearer as I analyze some texts later, but for the moment it is enough to notice how the higher-rated students tended to gravitate toward the first seven patterns and the "incompetent" students and "competent" employees toward the last seven. A fourth of

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the higher-rated students chose to divide their subject into static, categorical parts (collection and classification), a decision made by none of the bottom nine and only one of the older employees. Only around a third of the higher-rated student essays followed what could be called progressive or argumentative formats (inference through sequence), strategies adopted by three-fourths of the lowest-rated and three-fourths of the employee essays. Of course, my measure does not claim to describe anything definitive or privileged in discourse organization (texts are shaped many more ways than by just the logical), nor does it assign any necessary rhetorical value to any particular pattern or patterns here. But still it offers one systematic and concrete way to chart organizational performance, a way of seeing that uncovers logical structures which often underlie extended pieces of writing, and that discovers logical connections which teachers sometimes overlook. Its primary value is diagnostic. So if initially the measure found that, in one kind of organization, lowest-rated student writers stand closer to professional writers than to betterrated students, then we may be justified in looking with some suspicion on that uniform holistic rating of "lowest" and in looking, beneath the surface of error and ineptitude, a second time at the way these nine bottom essays are organized. Here is one of the nine, exactly as written. I have diagrammed what I take to be the main logical organization.

INTRODUCTION

LOGICAL C ON-

SUMMARY

Physical appearance or attractiveness needs to be down played in todays thinking. The obsession of people worrying about their physical appearance creates prejudices. Many people through out time have been caught in the appearancetrap. Many jobs requir some physical attractiveness, such as: Stewards; stewardesses; and models. Some employers will not hire over weight people, short people, or tall people with out judging their ability to produce the work which is required of the job. Many of the people which are rejected for work because of their physical shape or uglyness might be just the people suited for that particular job. FTakefor instance an over weight woman wants a job as a stewardess. Many over weight people have found that to over come their social block of their shape, they have to be more out going, more talkitive and have more general knowledge. A person who does not have this disability and on the other hand is pleaseing to the eye would not have this maturing strugle. IThe poudgy stewardess might make a better personality that the thin attractive one.

The top-level pattern is inference: SINCE struggle forges talent, and SINCE unattractive people struggle more than attractive, THEN unattractive people may be best for a job. The writer has made this logical construct remarkably

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difficult to see. The premises, mislabelled as an "instance," follow the conclusion, the introduction misleads (do the "people" of the third sentence turn out to be the employers, the applicants, or both?), and there is no paragraphing to graph logical boundaries. Yet when the logical sense is finally made explicit, one peculiar behavior of this short piece becomes evident, how rapidly and how far the writer's thinking presses on: There is a social block against overweight people; Therefore employers worry about physical appearance;Also therefore many jobs require attractive employees; Also thereforeoverweight people must struggle harder; As a result they are often talented; Converselyand comparativelyattractive people are often less talented; As a combinedresultsome employers reject people without testing their worth; As a resultthe best person is not hired; Therefore generallypeople should downplay physical appearance. So analysis by logical organization reveals a character which distinguishes this piece from much impromptu student writing: highly compressed sequential logical meditation. This is certainly not a characterone expects to find in "remedial" writing, yet other of the nine bottom essays divulge a similar demeanor. For the moment, let's avoid terms connoting deficiency or proficiency and call this a "lean" style. Obviously, when carried to an extreme, as in this case, lean writing will generate excesses in need of remediation. Such an extreme encourages one to look for its opposite, a stylistic exorbitance, one presumes, equally in need of remediation. In my sample it is the 500-word impromptu theme based on a gimcrack partition of the subject, typically an unconsidered enumeration of parts (collection)or a division into simplistic stages (development)-with top-heavy introduction, truckling summary, restatements and examples of every common point, boxy paragraphsall of a size. It seems to have everything but ideas that spring one from the other in a fecund sequence. Let's call it extreme "stout" writing. It is concerned not with the following out of ideas but with the settling in of ideas, not with search but with insertion. At the other end of the holistic spectrum, among the nine top-rated student essays, is one I would call an extreme of stout writing. In five paragraphs and 521 words, this essay argues that physical appearanceplays "an important role in people's attitudes"-not an argument, it seems, the writer has many doubts about, or expects the reader to have many. Analysis of logical ordering again locates the excess. The essay sorts its subject into three main cabinets: "youth and dating," "males and females," and "society." Collectionis the right name for this method of arrangement. The categories seem erected independently of one another (they are taken verbatim from a list of suggested topics in the essay prompt). And the way they so blatantly overlap suggests they are serving essentially as preset catch-alls, not as a sequence where one category logically evolves from another. This essay shows its stoutness not only in its main logical pattern, but also in embedded patterns. Here is its fourth paragraph(the third cabinet):

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PART #1

PART #2

PART #3

307

And last, we must deal with physical beauty and it's effect on society.lAs you all know, outward appearanceand charm is very important in the political scene. As was true in the Presi-

lose weight and be "beautiful" again. And even more sadly, people with physical handicaps are often stared at or rejected as if they were some kind of monster carrying a communicable disease. It often seems as though Brittania Jeans, Pierre Cardin industries, Clairol, Faberge, and Vidal Sassoon have complete control over the minds and bodies of the United States of America. Evidence of this can be found in all of us.

The paragraph builds up another collection, encasing again three items taken from the prompt. Of its seven sentences, three serve as introduction and restatement. On even further embedded levels, it generates, by my count, six more logically overlapping collections ("stared at or rejected"), one feeble degree ("even more sadly"), and two causations. Rhetorically the paragraph feels solid, but part of that feeling owes to the extreme simplicity and stasis of the logical relationships. By contrast here is a paragraph of about the same length from one of the bottom nine essays. It functions as the entire body of the essay, accompanied only by a two-sentence introductory paragraph.

SOLUTION THESIS ANTITHESIS

Girls in Highschool that are overweight never get asked to go to a dance. Although these girls may have the appearance of having a pretty face it is just because they are overweight. To the guy he may think of being laughed at by his friends. Even when these girls come to college thing will never change. When these girls go out with their friends to get picked up in a single bar, usually the girls that are not overweight will get picked up, whereas the girl that is overweight will not. You'll never find an overweight girl competing for the Miss America or Miss Universe. There is a lot of drawbacks for these girls. They may think it is some kind of handicap. Girls must have special clothing to fit themselves. When they go out to OPTION #1 eat or just standing in a lunch line, they asked for the calorie-cutter. Even for blind dates, girls overweight are turned down. There's no other alter- OPTION #2 native but for these girls to stay home. But I understand that these girls try there best to compete with girls that aren't overweight and beautiful.

-

CHOICE

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This paragraphis anything but static, forging on from a problem with a failed solutionthrough a choiceof options to an unresolved dialectic. The logical restlessness spreads to embedded levels, where I count two degrees,six comparisons, four causations,and two inferences. Both paragraphssuffer in a sense from the same problem, a radical sketchiness in conveying a complex reality. But I think it may now be clear why, in terms of the organization of these two attempts, the method of the lean paragraph has more appeal to older, more competent writers. There is simply more interest and potentially more reward (even if more difficulty) in working out the implications of an idea than in merely storing in support for it. Mapped out by my analysis of organization, the employee essays tend to look more like the lean paragraph, only with the logical segments filled out. No wonder. Imagine having to expand the stout paragraph, retaining its main logical compartments. I am not going to hypothesize a motive for extreme stout writing (although it is tempting to do so by citing the second sentence of the example above: "As you all know, outward appearanceand charm is very important in the political scene"). But I am going to hypothesize a modus or rationale for extreme lean, since this student style has been little recognized. First and last the writer wants to work out the logical ramifications of an idea set by a teacher. But tracking logical trails and inferring where they lead takes time. Minutes pass between the writing of one proposition and the acceptance of its implications. Flow is lost, sometimes even grammatical and syntactic linkage. Most easily left behind unrecorded are logical steps because it is the logical end itself that is being most ardently pursued. The writer certainly does not want to be sidetracked with information tangential to the main logical path, such as background, definitions, restatements, summary, illustrative examples, rhetorical color, or emphasis. Holistically, the essay providing the example of stout writing above got nearly the top combined score from my seven teachers, with rates of 8, 8, 8, 8, 7, 6, and 5 (standard deviation = 1.21). The essay providing the example of lean writing got the very lowest, with rates of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, and 2 (standard deviation = 0.49). The curiosity here is not the judgmental gap in overall quality between the two. The piece of stout writing surpasses the other in enough ways-in mechanics, cohesion, emphasis, support, etc.-to warrant the difference. What is curious is that the individual rates of the lean piece are so uniform. With the stout essay, some raters may have sensed the weakness of the organization, but no one seems to have been aware of the organizational strength of the lean. We are back to our original curiosity. If the nine bottom essays and their lean style were truly written by "disabled" students, then apparently one of their disabilities is in getting teachers to see such abilities as they have.

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The Wit of Bottom Writers Logical organizing is not the only area where the bottom essays as a group matched more nearly the performance of the competent non-academic writers than did the higher-rated essays. Another area I can only designate by a term somewhat outmoded today: verbal wit. Here the bottom nine ally with the employees in a style of shrewd or worldly practicality. This again is perhaps a surprise. Not only impromptu essay tests but also quick-answer, SAT-like examinations tend to put bottom writers down. When juniors or seniors in high school, these particular nine writers earned an average score on the verbal parts of a state-wide diagnostic which placed them in the bottom 15% of their class. But wit has more to do than with the semi-colons, spelling demons, and learned words of such high-pressure, verbal competition, and the stylistic output of shrewdness and practicality may take forms below the habitualized threshold of the composition-teacher vision. It does not take much re-reading of these nine short essays to catch their peculiar verbal intelligence. They appreciate the power of street-wise, faceslapping words: "Your just not good looking enough so bug off." Their sentences can be refreshingly brisk: "Conduct codes are created to protect people from criminals." Their ideas are often more compressed than one is used to seeing in student writing, in class or out: "The obsession of people worrying about their physical appearance creates prejudices." (Clauses in their essays average 10.3 words, equal to the achievement of the older writers and a full word higher than that of the other students.) They relish the thrust of syntactic parallelism: "The age has little to do with the fact, but much to do with the morals of society." (Their parallelism rate is 20% higher than in the other student essays.) They often attempt a dry, sardonic humor: "Even for blind dates, girls overweight are turned down," or "Quite often these people are overlooked because they are fat." Their metaphoric language stands close to life: "Young adults clinging to their family," or "Caught in the appearance trap," or "Some overweight people are like dark shadows, they are there, but are never really noticed." And throughout they show an unusual honesty, not the fact-slinging of one power at another, but the disinterested sooth-saying of the outsider with little to lose: "Am I so ugly I can't get dates?" or "We are all criminals." All in all, the mark of the individual is maintained more tenaciously in these nine essays than in the other eighty-seven. I am going to hypothesize a modus or rationale for this kind of verbal wit. First and last the writer feels noncompetitive. Thinking oneself out of competition prompts the freedom and devil-may-care unhurriedness from which flow writing characterized by introspection, humor, laconism, and that pithy irony with which the rustic jives the city-goer. "The recklessness which makes for originality," writes Edward Hoagland, who not incidentally is a stammerer, "often grows out of despair" (188). Or, in reverse order, the idling

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anomie of the noncompetitor may produce good patches of writing and poor scores on verbal tests, both through a refusal to reck-to reck convention and consequence. Both noncompetition and competition are deep motivations for writers. The second, of course, is much more familiar to most of us. We assume our writing vies, not necessarily is better than that of others, just in the same league. We first get accepted by a journal in our profession, then look to see whether we made lead article-and the first step is entirely distinct from the second, for the second is to see if we have made a certain grade, the first is to have made the grade. But with bottom students, noncompetition may be more familiar. Even if they have not been put out of the regular classrooms and into special cubicles, they still know they do not compete with their peers. The coach can't fool the player at the far end of the bench, who probably regrets the effort of having suited up and adopts that distrait, cut-off, sitting-in-theaudience slouch of those who are inside but not in. This is the vital and sometimes deadly meaning of "competence"-if you have it you are allowed to compete. If you don't, you live beyond the pale, outside the normal grades of society, in a bottom-most category so different it forms a class of its own and cannot be judged by the same standards. Students in special classes for bottom dwellers do not get grades, or the grades do not mean the same as normal ones. They are there because they did not make the grade in the first place. So what they write is slovenly, broken, and graceless, humorous, involuted, and honest.

Complexity at the Bottom We return again to our initial curiosity. Bottom-most writing-either the writing itself or the teachers' conception of it or both-seems to reside in a kind of tidy world apart, unendowed with the lively ambiguities of higher beings. One of the curiosities here, then, is why so unstratified a block of our population has attracted such a diversity of labels: "slow," "remedial," "disabled," "deficient," "developmental," "basic," "novice," even sometimes (sotto voce) "blockhead." Of course our culture also cannot agree on one name ibor the sorts of people who show up at unemployment centers. Yet the two populations do not entirely compare. Perhaps we may hesitate as little in deciding who should be sent to the writing centers, but we are apparently still fuzzy about the essential condition that leads writers to such a fate. Are they laggard in need of prodding ("slow"), lame in need of prosthesis ("disabled"), lacking in need of supplies ("deficient"), sick in need of cure ("remedial"), underdeveloped in need of catching up ("developmental"), well-based but in need of cultural refinement ("basic"), or new to writing in need of experience ("novice")?Or, sotto voce, just dumb?

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The answer is that bottom writers may not be any of these, or may be any combination of them. Many teachers have offered a rationale or modus for the kind of writer who ends up at the bottom of verbal tests or holistic ratings: lack of confidence, fear of writing, confusion with an unfamiliar culture, fixation in the security of a pre-formal cognitive stage. Surely where these negative motivations obtain in the ordinary bottom student, they are mingled, and are further mingled with positive motivations, such as the two we have been looking at, a devotion to the pursuit of ideas, a fondness for the play of verbal wit. But as we have seen, the ordinary bottom holistic score does not reflect such a mingle. For teachers the danger lies in the fact that a single analytical approach-whether it be a measure of logical organization, a count of clause length, a writing anxiety test, a spoken protocol, a Piaget or Perry schemewill tend to discover a single motivation. Compounding this danger is the other fact that the error-riddenand unstylish surface of bottom writing glares, shields the depths where the complexities are. Teachers agree on what constitutes the worst student writing not primarily because they recognize it easily. They recognize it easily because they have simplified it. And that has something to say about the academic fate of writers who have penned themselves into the bottom stall, through whatever excesses of fear or confusion or thoughtfulness or honesty. What Fate for Bottom Writers? Montaigne, the least competitive of all the great outsiders, noted that the honest is more lovable than the useful. Still my fondness for bottom prose must admit its ineffectiveness under the set conditions. Noncompetitive may not mean incompetent, or lean mean lacking, but they certainly mean a rotten grade. Selective quotes, and a deliberate setting aside of skills like punctuation and coherence, cannot hide the fact that, in the end, these writers have more to learn than the other students do about sharing thought. They mutter, stutter, mislead, skim, and omit, often wretchedly. My analysis suggests a little-used pedagogy, that a teacher can help them along by pointing to those skills they already have where they actually surpass the student above-their grasp of concrete language, their effective compression of syntax, their truthfulness, their wit, their feeling for metaphor, their finding out and tracking down trails of thought. Students at the bottom must think of themselves not only as "shadows" but as "dark shadows," as worse writers than they really are. If they can be shown that they top other students in some ways, they may regain that vital sense of competition. But therein lurks a vitiating cajolery. With the competition come the rules, with the rules the compromises, with the compromises losses. The leisurely and time-consuming search for logical ramifications will have a difficult

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time fending off the academic demands for bulk, high readability, and orderly pigeonholing. Even more bleak looks the fate of the down-turned wit under the gaze of academic solemnity, or the worldly slang against the Latin legions of polysyllables, or patient and compressed syntax caught in the rush for length. Surely the fate of bottom writers during the first years of college is often a retreat from familiar impediments and an advance toward uncomfortable accommodations. I cannot think of any more difficult task of a teacher than to find ways to block this retreat while still advancing the writing of these students. The most direct way would show them how competent adults use some of the conventions that assist readability and production, yet still maintain the wit, the honesty, the gritty vernacular, the progressive organization-as in this piece from a 458-word employee essay: Mom alwayssaid you had to sufferif you wantedto look good. So we torturedourselveswith girdles, outrageouspointed-toed shoes, smelly padded bras, overbakedperms. We even went around for a few years looking like the bridesof Draculawith our white lipstick and nail polish. And then came bee-hivehairdos,sprayedbrittle. No wonderfashionrebelled and went naturalin the 70's. What a relief! And yet I and my beautyvaluessystem can't go "natural."I have to forcemyself to find the "beauty"in the "beast,"and when it happens,as it so often does, once againI walk the treadmillof being ashamed. The bottom skills could be identified and praised along with titles, examples, and correct spelling. Sequential logical structures hidden in lean in-class writing could be diagrammed and, while the writers continue such exploration of ideas in impromptu essays, the diagram could be used as a plan for a more fully elaborated out-of-class essay. Sophisticated sentences and patterns could be taken from the "basic" writers and taught to the others. Truly "developmental" students might need to regress-to go back, begin over, and practice elementary techniques that they somehow bypassed, as in the psychotherapy that had adult patients crawling around in diapers. For my bottom students I suspect more would be gained with the older, nondiscriminatory therapy of leading from strength. Actually, prior to instruction, in one way teachers ought to discriminate. They ought to further sort apart the unfortunate who have been sorted into the bottom, to distinguish lean from noncompetitive from second-languaged from dialect-languaged from culture-shocked from what Janice N. Hays calls "suburban basic" (145), and so on. Annette N. Bradford suggests tests in thinking to screen the "cognitively immature," a procedure that at least might keep teachers from confusing "slow" minds with what is just slow writing. Actually, what I suspect such a testing would show- assuming it has some workable validity- is little or no correlation between "backward"writing and "immature" thinking. Against the number of studies which have argued that basic writers lag in cognitive maturity (see Patricia Bizzell's 1982

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review), one ought to set the caution of two researcherswho ironically did so much to further the very notion of cognitive maturity, Inhelder and Piaget: "Verbal productions can by no means fully account for the structures of intelligence" (246, fn. 1). One ought also to ask how closely the verbal productions of writers deemed basic have been scrutinized for structures of intelligence. As we have seen, my "remedial" writers here, in terms of logical ordering structures, compare better with matured post-graduates than with their college peers. The paragraph of lean writing (bottom of p. 307) may seem innocent of nearly every writing convention, but its final position of uncertain, unresolved dialectic is unusually sophisticated for a college student, at least according to some studies of post-formal adult development (e.g., Basseches; Labouvie-Vief; Murphy and Gilligan). As teachers, we should deeply question any inference about intellectual maturity based only on skill in following writing conventions. The conventions themselves, in fact, could stand some questioning. Mina P. Shaughnessy, Mike Rose, and others recommend teaching university conventions to "novice" students openly and systematically. There is a healthy pragmatism in this, but such pragmatism could use an equally healthy dollop of skepticism, or at least an awareness of the price paid. Should stoutness, for instance, be a necessary convention of in-class writing? Richard Ohmann has shown how "specific details close off analysis" (391), and I would add that in the confines of an hour or two-hour placement essay, extended analogies, restatements, clever introductions, and other of our beloved crutches for the reader, even perfect spelling and punctuation, may also disable good exploratory thinking. In her observation of revision practices, Glynda Hull noted that her "less skilled" writers, compared to her "more skilled," focused more on errors of meaning and less on errors of surface form, and that they more often "expressed a concern for making a text literally true or accurate" (25). If, as she suggests, writers with such a focus and concern show less skill because they have "not yet learned to distinguish between matters of necessity and matters of choice," then maybe university writing teachers ought to start making truth and accuracy in writing more of a necessity and surface form more of a choice. Andrea Lunsford found "basic" writers using the first-person more often than "skilled" writers do, Sandra Stotsky found "poor" writers creating subjects of sentences simpler than those of "good" writers, and David Bartholomae found "developmental" writers often attempting "syntax that is morecomplex than convention requires" (254). But greater use of the first person and simpler subjects and more complex syntax all characterizethe writing of my "competent" workplace writers in comparison with my undergraduates as a whole (Change).Maybe we should start encouraging different conventions, ones that more nearly match those of the non-academic world, even if they produce lower inter-rater reliability coefficients on holistic assessments. We return a last time to the odd conformity among teacher ratings of bottom essays. Without any doubt, changing of the standards by which English

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teachers judge student writing is a political matter of growing urgency as the import of writing itself grows more and more beyond departments of English, across the curriculum and into the marketplace. But if it is a matter I will not broach here, that does not mean that the phenomenon I have been looking at is an idle curiosity. Let me be blunt and say that high concordanceon low holistic scores looks awfully like stereotyping, which is never an idle phenomenon. So there is another change English departments ought to encourage, and continue to encourage regardless of what writing standards we operate under, and that is to put less weight on accuracy of assessment and more weight on keenness of diagnosis. Diagnosis of writing is an act richly intuitive, disturbingly complex, and fateful. For the student's sake, we ought to study every turn we take there. When we notice one lack, do we sometimes create another, deficiencies hiding proficiencies? Does the very act of seeing an object as complex as writing require categorizations which belie that very complexity? What tacit operations does the judicious discrimination of diagnosis share with the prejudicial discrimination of bigotry? A Counter-Assessment In the 1830's in England, the epithet "pauper"usually carried with it a onedimensional meaning and often a more unpleasant fate. To be a "pauper"was to be placed in a time-honored, almost mythic journey to ruin: rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief. As "rats"and "parasitesof the state," "paupers"were assigned to workhouses to pick oakum and cobble roads, were separated from spouses and children if married, were jailed if in debt, and if dying were sometimes carted by night to be discarded beyond the bourns of their home parish. In that decade journalist William Cobbett (another great outsider) registered a telling protestation: "What is a pauper? Only a very poor man." In Cobbett's line, it is important to see, the word "Only" simplifies in order to allow for the multi-dimensionality of the word "man." What is a student at the bottom? Only someone who needs to learn a lot. But not everything. "Poor" writers do not deserve to be stripped of the peculiar skills they already have, nor enrolled in some imaginary one-way intellectual journey. The group in the nether cubicle is not sui generis or unstratified, but is as eccentric as any other. No doubt teachers with more experience than the ones who rated my bottom essays recognize more variety in bottom students, and English teachers in general certainly recognize more variety there than does anyone else in society. It seems unfair to compare the conception and treatment of writing students at the academic bottom today in the United States with that of people at the economic bottom in England in 1830. But then it may be unwise not to compare the two. Let's take that piece of history as a measure both of how far we have come and of how perilously near we stand, and take Cobbett's protestation as a kind of assessment, or counterassessment, we must keep making over and over.

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