Knowledge Is Power

I have the distinction of having once, very early in my career, before I knew better, created a writing prompt that became the basis of a lawsuit. At the heart of the litigation was the question of how much privacy students may expect at school. What kinds of questions may students be required to answer?

The prompt was part of a mandatory writing assessment for a statewide testing program. I can't discuss the details of the prompt for two reasons: such discussion is not only prohibited by the non-disclosure agreement I signed as an employee of Great Big Huge Test Publishing Company, but is impossible due to the effects of the passing of time on my memory. I mean! Since 1993, I've written hundreds of writing prompts and thousands of test questions.

I do remember that the prompt had to do with the kinds of questions typically given candidates at job interviews, and then asked students to answer some kind of similar question, probably something like this:

During a job interview, candidates may be asked to discuss a difficult situation they handled successfully. Write an essay in which you describe an obstacle you have overcome or a difficult situation you handled successfully. You may write about real life or you may make up a situation for your essay.

That last line is important, isn't it. The point wasn't to gather personal information about students, but to give students a chance to demonstrate mastery in writing. No one cared what the content was, really; students could have written about learning to tie their shoes or training a puppy or choosing between different brands of sneakers. I don't know how the lawsuit turned out.

However, what happens when the purpose is to gather personal information about students in order to "get to know students better"? What happens when the questions are administered in two packets that total 33 pages for students to complete on their own, and the questions have to do with the most private of private personal and family matters? What happens when teachers are asking students--without having built a relationship with the students, without having observed any pathology, behavior disorder, or any other dysfunction in the students--whether they or any family members have ever been depressed, abused alcohol or other substances, relied on unhealthful strategies to cope with stress?

A lot of parents may not know this is happening at school. I do, because I look at every page of my daughters' schoolwork.

Some parents may not care--but I wonder how those parents would feel if a stranger walked up to them and asked them those same intrusive questions? (And others. I'm cherry-picking.)

I wonder how the teachers who are asking the questions would feel if the tables were turned, and someone in a position of authority were asking them questions that invaded their privacy?

Oh, wait. I already know how those teachers would react. It's all right here.

Parents should know (and schools should know, but clearly they do not) that if schools are going to gather personal information about students, the schools are required by law to first notify the parents to allow parents to exercise their right to opt out.

It is the parents' responsibility to know our rights and our children's rights, and to advocate for our children.

According to the Protection of Pupil Rights Amendment, schools must notify parents if they are going to ask about:

• Mental and psychological problems potentially embarrassing to the student and his/her family;
• Sex behavior and attitudes;
• Illegal, anti-social, self-incriminating and demeaning behavior;
• Critical appraisals of other individuals with whom respondents have close family relationships;
• Legally recognized privileged or analogous relationships, such as those of lawyers, physicians, and ministers; or
• Income (other than that required by law to determine eligibility for participation in a program or for receiving financial assistance under such program).

Sunshine, Cross-Referenced to Amen Corner

My colleague (not that I have just the one, only that he is the colleague with whom I work most closely these days) sent me this, a post by Roy Peter Clark on William Zinsser's On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction.

I must go now. I feel inspired to delete extraneous words from a recent essay.

Would that I remember this and apply the knowledge to my emails.

Lameness in Action

Cranky alert. Consider yourself warned.

In my daughters' geometry textbooks are several questions that result in answers that have double meanings. You know the ones. 420. That other two-digit number that would make a room of high school students smirk. Last year, in a different textbook, there was another number that made my daughters' middle-school math teacher burst out laughing, but they couldn't remember what it was.

Years ago, a math writer thought it would be funny to tuck a reference to Mary Kay Letourneau into a test question.

The writers must think it's funny. Maybe they are grandiose in their thinking and consider themselves subversive. It just seems immature to me.

If It's Broke

At Children's Book Insider, Laura Backes offers common problems in stories for children, which are common problems in all narrative writing (thin plot, bad plot, flat characters, and bland, obnoxious, or otherwise unappealing voice), and concludes with a reminder about the importance of a solid command of mechanics:

When submitting to an editor, grammatical errors can distract from an otherwise strong book. When self-publishing, they're the kiss of death. If you know you have problems with punctuation, spelling, subject/verb agreement, formatting dialogue, etc., hire a good copy editor to clean up your manuscript. There are people out there who live to fix these problems. Use them.

If these be the common problems, what are the solutions? Backes says exactly what I say to writers who ask me how to improve their writing: Read. Read a lot.

Find writers you like and read everything they wrote. If you skipped out on the great books in high school and college, consider taking another crack at them: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice, Anna Karenina--there are lists all over the place if you need ideas on what to read:

• 100 Novels everyone should read here.
• Information Is Beautiful on the books everyone must read here.

The reason people like them is that they are great stories beautifully written. A lot of them. I couldn't stand Herzog, but it always ends up on someone's list. In matters of taste there is no argument.

By the way, if anyone is ever looking for an editor, I know a few whom I highly recommend, whose work is so good and evidence of such knowledge and skill that I am dazzled. It may surprise you that one might be dazzled by the skillful wielding of grammar and punctuation, but thorough competence always does dazzle.

Words for the day:

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

Samuel Johnson hadn't seen the Occupational Outlook Handbook when he said that.

If, Then

If you're always dreamed of writing a novel, National Novel Writing Month is coming up. More here.

If you're ever made a mistake, you might want to exploit it exorcise it work through it and let it go by writing about it for a contest. More here.

If you need deadlines to inspire you to write, there are plenty of other contests and competitions. More here. And here.

If you've always wanted to know more about how to build a sentence, you could read this.

If you'd like an opportunity to shake your head at the sorry state of affairs for writers, you could look at this.

Same as above, but for editors.

If you'd like an opportunity to feel righteously indignant, read about the Amazon review scandal. More here.

If you are a student (at any grade level) and you'd like to try writing and illustrating a six-word memoir, now's your chance. More here.

Measure What Can Be Measured

I'm in DC for a joyous occasion, and even so--even here, in the midst of the joy, even in the thrill of riding the Metro and the suspense of wondering if this be the ride during which I become irretrievably lost in the bowels of the city--I'm thinking about readability.

In assessment publications, readability, or the grade at which we might reasonably expect a student to be able to read a given text, is determined by one or more of these measures:

• a readability formula, such as Flesch-Kincaid, Lexile, or another
• the monitoring of vocabulary according to a graded word list, such as EDL Core Vocabularies (Steck Vaughn) or The Children's Writer's Word Book (Mojilner)
• content area expertise
• teacher review

Because of the Common Core Standards, one can no longer talk about readability without text complexity pulling up a chair to the table. Which is all to the good.

Here is an explanation of Lexile by Jason Turner at MetaMetrics (by posting this, I intend neither to promote nor disparage Lexile, simply to offer information). I'd like to clarify that when Turner identifies Lexile as a measure of text complexity, he means that it is a quantitative measure--there is no readability formula capable of providing a qualitative measure. 

This is such a vital point that I feel compelled to repeat that there is no readability formula capable of providing a qualitative measure. 

Readability formulae cannot interpret nor analyze meaning. No theme, motif, trope, metaphor, symbol--no beauty, no lyricism--can be interpreted nor analyzed by a readability formula, which greatly diminishes the likelihood that such a formula could provide an accurate measure of literary text. Readability formulae can count.

What is counted--word frequency, word length, sentence length--may vary from formula to formula. It doesn't seem to matter much what is counted; like the yellow, green, orange, and blue lines of the DC Metro trains that all pull up to L'Enfant Plaza, the readability formulae tend to arrive at the same conclusions: "No one of the quantitative measures performed significantly differently than the others in predicting student outcomes."

These formulae, therefore, are most useful in evaluating the suitability of informational text for students at a certain grade level, much less useful in evaluating the suitability of literary text, and not at all useful for evaluating the suitability of poetry or drama.

Here is an explanation published by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors' Association:

There will be exceptions to using quantitative measures to identify the grade band; sometimes qualitative considerations will trump quantitative measures in identifying the grade band of a text, particularly with narrative fiction in later grades. Research showed more disagreement among the quantitative measures when applied to narrative fiction in higher complexity bands than with informational text or texts in lower grade bands. Given this, preference should sometimes be given to qualitative measures when evaluating narrative fiction intended for students in grade 6 and above. For example, some widely used quantitative measures rate the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Grapes of Wrath as appropriate for grades 2–3. This counterintuitive result emerges because works such as Grapes often express complex ideas or mature themes in relatively commonplace language (familiar words and simple syntax), especially in the form of dialogue that mimics everyday speech. Such quantitative exceptions for narrative fiction should be carefully considered, and exceptions should be rarely exercised with other kinds of text. It is critical that in every ELA classroom students have adequate practice with literary non-fiction that falls within the quantitative band for that grade level. To maintain overall comparability in expectations and exposure for students, the overwhelming majority of texts that students read in a given year should fall within the quantitative range for that band.

It seems clear, then, that for literary text we must rely on a second opinion. And yet, from what I see, reviewers (content editors at test publishing companies, panels of teachers convened to evaluate test materials) continue to rely primarily on quantitative formulae rather than qualitative considerations when deciding to accept or reject literary passages. Just as we can all agree that Grapes of Wrath is hardly a book for second- and third-graders, I think we can all agree that this is a mistake.

I understand why and how this mistake is made. Unless trained in the study of literature (which is and has been a bona fide field of study for centuries upon centuries), who feels qualified to make decisions about a literary work? And yet, in the immortal words of Galileo, here we must find some way to "make measurable what cannot be measured."

The good news is that there are many people who are so trained. Why not add their voices to the mix? This would surely help us remain true to the goal of creating the best fit possible between reader and text.



 
And now, I'd like to return to the beginning and wish Kia and Roy, the two most brilliant people I know, two who are blessed with every gift of intellect and heart, two who are not just brilliant writers but purely lovely human beings, every possible happiness. The Donne poem is from the ceremony.

THE GOOD-MORROW
by John Donne

I WONDER by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? were we not wean'd till then ?
But suck'd on country pleasures, childishly ?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers' den ?
'Twas so ; but this, all pleasures fancies be;
If ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee.

And now good-morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
For love all love of other sights controls,
And makes one little room an everywhere.
Let sea-discoverers to new worlds have gone;
Let maps to other, worlds on worlds have shown;
Let us possess one world; each hath one, and is one.

My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres 
 Without sharp north, without declining west?
Whatever dies, was not mix'd equally;
If our two loves be one, or thou and I
Love so alike that none can slacken, none can die.

Source:
Donne, John. Poems of John Donne. vol I. E. K. Chambers, ed. London: Lawrence & Bullen, 1896. 

NOTE: Just for fun, here are the Flesch-Kincaid measures for both the John Donne poem and this blog post.
Flesch-Kincaid measure for "The Good-Morrow": 2.1
Flesch-Kincaid measure for "What Can Be Measured": 12.0

NOTE THE SECOND: I listened to this bit with Martha Nussbaum on the value of the humanities and wanted to share.

What the World Needs Now

It may be unnecessary to say that in talking about what's wrong, I don't mean to pick on anybody in particular. Even if it is one person making specific mistakes, I tend to see this as a systemic ill, as previously discussed, rather than an opportunity to dogpile on an unwitting offender.

A systemic ill that is particularly pernicious in the test publishing industry. How can we expect kids to do well on tests when the tests themselves are riddled with error?

The safeguards are so simple:

1. provide adequate training (again, as previously discussed)

2. follow some kind of standard process for detecting and repairing error

3. use the information from #2 to supplement #1

These safeguards cost time and money, which explains why so many companies have gradually let them fall by the wayside. 

Training takes time and attention. I can't believe how fortunate I was to have received the training I did. In my first year as an associate editor, I probably had more training opportunities than editors now receive in a decade. It was a different era. The Great Big Huge Test Publishing Company at which I worked had an army of style editors, proofreaders, and QA personnel.

Over the last dozen years, I've seen companies completely dismantle their style editing departments and outsource the work to freelance editors. Now style editors (copy editors) are held in such low regard that if any Bright Young Thing with a talent for grammar and language conventions tells me she'd like to give this work a try, I steer her away from style editing and into content.  I hate doing it. I myself hold style editors in high esteem, maybe because often their job seems to be to keep me from making a fool of myself. What the world needs now--no disrespect intended to Dionne Warwick and Burt Bacharach--is more style editing.

Many companies have also dismantled their content development departments.

So there's no real continuity for item writers and content editors. They work on a project for one company and then skip to a project for another. The content development people who remain at the companies are overwhelmed and certainly don't have the time to provide training to freelancers; editors accept or reject items, which means they're likely to fix mistakes themselves, and so the item writer never hears of his mistakes and is free to repeat those mistakes forever in a state of unfortunate ignorant complacence.

Right now, I'm thinking of all this in terms of language conventions items, because I was reviewing a set this morning, but I'm sure this applies to all domains and content areas.

Right now, I offer some specific observations about language items:
1. When language items accompany an editing passage that contains embedded error, the content of each item must be mutually exclusive. A sentence from the passage should contain only one error, and should be used only for one item in a set.
2. "Syntax" has to do with grammatical rules; "diction" has to do with the writer's choice of words.
3. An item should clearly target only one type of error, and should not mix types of errors. For example, a punctuation item shouldn't include distractors that contain errors in verb tense.

More previously discussed here.

As an aside, it's interesting how you can learn a lot about a person by reviewing his or her work, and how this body of knowledge grows over time. It's like how my mechanic told me that he knows more about his customers from the condition of their cars than he does from talking with them. He can tell who drives erratically, who slams on the brakes, who grinds the gears, and he can tell who doesn't. Everything is everything. You can develop a similar personality profile simply by reviewing a writer's work.

I can't tell you how many times I've finished working on a manuscript, items or reading passage, don't make no difference, and felt a deep and tender affection for the writer because his or her work demonstrated care, attention, and conscientiousness. 

UPDATE: Forgot to mention. I started writing about all this because I saw this book mentioned in the Common Core Standards and immediately ordered it.