Noncompositional

Recently, Slashdot pointed to a little experiment held to determine how well bloggers would do on the new essay portion of the new SAT. The results are summarized here. The analysis was interesting, and perhaps predictable. One grader writes:

Overall the quality of the essays was not far above that of high school students writing their first practice essays. The biggest differences I noticed were in grammar and diction: most of the entrants wrote in complete, generally grammatical sentences, and there were fewer awkward turns of phrase and poorly-chosen “vocab words” than I see in student writing. The organization and logical flow of the essays, on the other hand, was on the whole surprisingly sloppy. Many people seemed not to understand that the assignment was to write a persuasive essay *with a clear point of view*. Often writers tried to be clever with roundabout ways of coming at the question, but it only made my job as a grader more difficult, and grumpy graders don’t give fives and sixes. If anything, the bloggers were *worse* than high school students in getting to the point and staying on topic. They also tended to equivocate more, to argue the merits of both sides, which, though it might mark you as a reasonable person in normal discussion (in real or online life), actually hurts your SAT score.

Makes sense. This reminds me of what my high school AP US History teacher told us before the AP exam: make our essays short and sweet. Make a point, back it up, and then get the hell out. And it worked: despite having the most lenient curriculum I’d ever seen for an AP class, I think nearly everyone passed, if not scored well. (little did they know it would be worth approximately jack at university). The same advice was presented to me (by training CDs) for the writing portion of the GRE, part of which explicitly looks for you to address a particular argument. In general, it’s good advice. You can’t just write clearly, you have to present a clear point of view.

There are certainly those linguists, or schools of linguistic thought, who prescribe to this method of writing. Or at least, there are those who say it is always better to make strong, even exaggerated claims, because those are the most interesting, or the easiest to debate about, or to argue against and improve upon. To a certain degree, I concur with this point of view. Of course, sometimes it’s better to take a more measured approach. It’s good to admit when you don’t know the whole story. But a little assertiveness doesn’t hurt. A lot, though…