The Chicago Tribune published an editorial recently with the point being: "Brevity in writing is beautiful. So is precision of fact."

Students will be taking the new SAT exams (for non-Americans, they are tests before entering college) where they now have to write an essay for the exam, in 25 minutes. Dr. Perelman at MIT studied the grading of SAT essays and found the correlation between length and grade on the tests as "stunning." The shortest (100 words or so) got the lowest grades, while the longest (400 words or so) got the highest grades.

Here is the part that aggravated me: "Getting the facts wrong didn't matter, as long as the factual mistakes didn't affect the writing quality of the essay. One example: A writer may say the American Revolution began in 1842 and not be penalized for missing the mark by decades." They rationalize this by saying that students are "under a lot of pressure" and the test is measuring the ability to write a coherent and compelling essay, even if the facts may be wrong.

I can't believe it! How can an essay be "coherent" and "compelling" if the facts are wrong?

I'm tempted to give up altogether with some people . This "it doesn't matter what you say, so long as you say it and get it in first" attitude is what's at the core of many problems with news reporting and the latest fiasco with Newsweek.

We in the UK have had many educational experiments since the 1960s, when they really started proliferating. Most of them fizzled out after a short time to be replaced by something else equally short-lived, but one that has hung around is the idea that "it doesn't matter about the quality of the work, so long as the student has expressed him/herself fully". So teachers were no longer allowed to cover essays in red pencil corrections to spelling and grammar in case it "inhibited the students' creativity" . Consequently, we are now in the second generation of people who cannot spell or punctuate and who are rapidly moving from not caring that they can't to being genuinely bewildered when you correct them because they actually don't know about grammar and punctuation.

I was a mature student at my University (I was 40 years old when I started at Loughborough University in the English midlands). It's got an extremely good reputation - deservedly. I did a Bachelor's degree in English Literature/Linguistics and was one of several mature students on the course. About two weeks into the first semester of the first year, we were told that we would all have to attend compulsory grammar lessons and we were shocked by the lack of knowledge of basic grammar displayed by the younger students. There were several who had no idea what a noun or a verb was, let alone the correct use of the apostrophe! These students were, supposedly, the cream of their schools and had achieved high marks in their qualifying exams in order to get into university and had actually chosen to study English. They knew all about literature (or at least the books they had studied) but they hadn't been taught the basics of the language which underpins all that writing .

My father was in the Royal Air Force. Apart from two months at the age of 5, I didn't start school until I was 7 years old and I left at 16. During that time I attended 9 different schools of varying academic quality.

I've always been grateful that one of those schools was an Army school in Cyprus which I attended from the age of 11 to nearly 13. The English teacher there was amazing and she had an effect on me which has endured to this day. Not only did she give us a thorough grounding in grammar, spelling and punctuation, but she placed great emphasis on clarity and brevity. She used to tell us all to prepare a short talk (about two minutes) on a subject of our choice which we would present to the other class members and her favourite was to set "journalistic" essays of a specific length. If she told us that she wanted an essay of 300 words (or whatever) that was the length we must write to - no longer and no shorter. It sharpens the mind amazingly when you know you have to hand in exactly 300, 500 or whatever number of words.

In 1988, I did a five month intensive training course in Technical Authorship (one of the government's numerous work-training courses for unemployed people) learning to write instruction manuals for computer programs. Unfortunately, I couldn't get a job in that line (I got caught in the "no job without experience, no experience without a job" loop), but I learned many valuable lessons in different styles of writing, including investigative writing and the fine art of collaboration. There were 10 of us on the course and one of the exercises was to pair up with one of the other students and prepare a report on a fictional accident in a factory. We were given the scenario, the Terms of Reference and a few other guidelines and let loose. Fortunately for me, my partner had actually done something similar in his previous job and I learned a lot from him.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Dianthus,

But you only feel doubt because you know, in this case, the right fact, and it jars. Say it said the Hundred Years War began in 1308. Offhand I have no idea how far off that is, except that it could be correct (whereas 1208 or 1608 couldn't be). If the writing is coherent and compelling, we'd naturally accept as fact the facts that are confidently asserted in it. Coherence is an internal property of the form of argument; compulsion is an overall effect on the reader, one capable of being defeated by the reader's detection of an error (or a fallacy).

quote:

Originally posted by aput:
But you only feel doubt because you know, in this case, the right fact, and it jars. Say it said the Hundred Years War began in 1308. Offhand I have no idea how far off that is, except that it could be correct (whereas 1208 or 1608 couldn't be). If the writing is coherent and compelling, we'd naturally accept as fact the facts that are confidently asserted in it. Coherence is an internal property of the form of argument; compulsion is an overall effect on the reader, one capable of being defeated by the reader's detection of an error (or a fallacy).

Which doesn't really say much beyond "we are more likely to believe a good liar than a bad one."

quote:

attitude is what's at the core of many problems with news reporting and the latest fiasco with Newsweek.

According to an article in the Chicago Tribune (though, I am linking to it from the Salt Lake Tribune on Google news), Newsweek wasn't all that wrong, after all.

Okay, Bob & aput, I see your point. The reader has a responsibility too. However, if I don't trust the writer, I will no longer read his or her writing.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: Kalleh,