College freshmen write so well...

[quade 3]

The last three posts in this thread make me sad.

Spelling is only a small and basic function of writing. Spelling is at best rote memorization. Writing an essay entails and tests far higher mental functions.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Boogers 0]

quade

The last three posts in this thread make me sad.

Spelling is only a small and basic function of writing. Spelling is at best rote memorization. Writing an essay entails and tests far higher mental functions.

Tails? You know hard it was to swing from trees when evolution took away our prehensile tails?

[winsor 186]

kallend

That the SAT is dropping the essay requirement.

www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/sat-to-drop-essay-requirement-and-return-to-top-score-of-1600-in-redesign-of-admission-test/2014/03/05/2aa9eee4-a46a-11e3-8466-d34c451760b9_story.html

Sure

Keep a copy of Doug Kenney's "How to Write Good" on hand and you're all set.

[kelpdiver 2]

SkyDekker

I'll bet you could put a simple cover letter and resume together though.

I am amazed at the lack of ability to do a simple thing like that, in proper English, by those who have graduated high school.

Oh, I don't question it at all. even my high school, which was considered one of the strongest in CA, didn't make me a very good writer - it took the few reqs at college to finally understand it.

But most of the time, I wrote using a computer, and (hopefully) made multiple passes. In this SAT written, or most finals I took, you're writing by hand in a blue book. No time to draft, and poor legibility is hard to get past, just as it's difficult to get past badly accented English when talking to someone.

[JerryBaumchen 1,048]

Hi Paul,

While I appreciate your thoughts, the day that this site does anything near that to me, I will walk away forever.

It is website; it is not going to change the world.

Take care,

JerryBaumchen

[champu 1]

kallend

*********We didn't have chains; we had to make our own rope out of fiber.

Wendy P.

We had to chew bark to make our own fiber

Luxury.

We used to show up for the test and wait in line all day for the privledge. They'd shout questions at us and we had to write out the answers, in triplicate, using our own blood on the backs of our hands.

You still had blood to use?

Well, when I say 'blood' it was only the cold black bile left behind from decades of malnutrition and crushing poverty, but it was 'blood' to us!

[NWFlyer 2]

quade

The last three posts in this thread make me sad.

Spelling is only a small and basic function of writing. Spelling is at best rote memorization. Writing an essay entails and tests far higher mental functions.

Such as identifying sarcasm when you see it?

(I realize I didn't use the sarcasm font, but I would hope that given my long history of fairly obnoxious grammar policing on this forum, that it might have been fairly obvious that I was joking).

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

[NWFlyer 2]

And now, since quade is sad about my joke, I'll try a "for real" response.

Dropping the essay requirement from the SAT could be looked at in two ways.

The first is to acknowledge that it's a fundamentally flawed way to evaluate a student's writing skill, and, as such, we should get rid of it because it sucks so hard.

The second would be to say that we're just further dumbing down the test by taking away the essay requirement. There's probably some validity to that, too, but it gets into the larger debate about the quality and relevance of standardized tests as a predictor of college academic success, and I don't think that's what this thread is about.

Prof. Kallend has significantly more exposure to the writing of college students than I do, but I see the writing of many college grads both at work and in other contexts and it makes me sad, too. I'm well-known within my department as being the go-to person if you need something edited, because the chances are very high that I'll catch 99.9% of errors in spelling, grammar, and style. Edited to add: Spell check is a nice tool to use as part of this process, but it's far from the be all end all, as it won't catch errors/typos where the writer used the wrong, but correctly spelled, word. But it's nice for the first pass.

Not only will I do that, but I'll also polish the writing to a high shine so that it clearly represents the idea being communicated.

Despite my own editing skills, I'm also very cognizant that I'm human, and thus will regularly and consistently ask for editing from others on high-visibility communications. It's so easy to overlook errors in your own writing, particularly if you've read and re-read something a bunch of times. It's also really easy to think you've communicated a concept clearly when you're intimately familiar with it, but a fresh set of eyes will find that sentence or 10 where you've obfuscated a key point, and bring it to your attention.

The interesting part is that I got to where I am through a few different influences: 1) a mother who is just like me in this regard, so there's both a nature/nurture component to my own language skill development. 2) a stellar high school English department with incredibly high standards that not only taught us how to write, but how to edit our own work and that of our peers and 3) a 4-year stint writing and editing on my college newspaper.

So I probably could have knocked the SAT essay out of the park if it had been part of the test when I took it, but who knows, I might have been marked down for not using enough big words.

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

[jakee 1,255]

I believe you meant to say 'consistently'. I'm afraid this egregious error invalidates your entire point of view.

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[NWFlyer 2]

jakee

I believe you meant to say 'consistently'. I'm afraid this egregious error invalidates your entire point of view.

See, this is why I also advocated having someone else read your work. Thank you, jakee, for providing that valuable editing and thus helping me to prove my point!

(Edit to add: It was particularly smooth of me to make an error in the very sentence in which I advocated for the importance of a second set of eyes. I meant to do that. Yeah, that's it, that's the ticket.)

"There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences." -P.J. O'Rourke

[jakee 1,255]

I believe it all! Hey, you even pointed out that spellcheck doesn't help when it's simply the wrong word

Do you want to have an ideagasm?

[kallend 1,623]

NWFlyer

But why do they need to know how to write anymore? Isn't that what spell check is for?

Yew aught two of noun batter then too right that.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[champu 1]

Yore write.

[turtlespeed 212]

champu

Yore write.

Rite!

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[kallend 1,623]

Well, another issue is whether the SAT is relevant at all.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-sat/2014/03/07/b3b03c4e-a568-11e3-84d4-e59b1709222c_story.html

To the best of my recollection, SAT scores don't correlate with success in engineering majors. ACT math scores, on the other hand, do have a positive correlation.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[sfzombie13 307]

i have always been a stickler for spelling and proper grammar. i even spell things out in a text message. i sometimes use military abbreviations, but not often. the thing that really gets me hot about this these days is the huge amount of professional writing that contain errors. now, i know that i am not perfect, but i am vastly better than most of these "professionals". i suppose that in the high tech world we live in, editors have just gone by the wayside. and also, i hate when spell check tells me that a word is spelled incorrectly when i know it is correct. like advisor. it always comes up with the red line, but i know that it is correct. i hate seeing it spelled adviser. it just looks wrong.

_________________________________________
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

[quade 3]

sfzombie13

i have always been a stickler for spelling and proper grammar. i even spell things out in a text message.

Though it appears as if capitalization is not your friend.









Nice going e.e.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[sfzombie13 307]

nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming. anything i used a computer for was always in lowercase. that was all i knew until the internet came along. since then, chat rooms got all lowercase, as did any type of forum. and text messages later. email and every other type of writing gets the proper format. i even have a habit of using semi-colons properly in text messages. and i have been known to use the phrase "from time to time" occasionally when I didn't have spell check and forgot how to spell occasionally. except for "battalion"; i always spell that one wrong the first time.

_________________________________________
Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes

[quade 3]

sfzombie13

nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[Andy9o8 0]

quade

***nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.

Hell in a handbasket, Paul.

[kallend 1,623]

Andy9o8

******nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.

Hell in a handbasket, Paul.

He's just telling us that he's imaginary.

...

The only sure way to survive a canopy collision is not to have one.

[turtlespeed 212]

kallend

*********nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.

Hell in a handbasket, Paul.

He's just telling us that he's imaginary.

I think he is admitting to his belief in Hell.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[quade 3]

turtlespeed

************nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.
Hell in a handbasket, Paul.
He's just telling us that he's imaginary.
I think he is admitting to his belief in Hell.

What? You've never met a fore?

quade -
The World's Most Boring Skydiver

[turtlespeed 212]

quade

***************nope, it's a personal preference from way back when i first started programming.

Doesn't matter. Still gets you an "F" in written English usage.

If we all just used our own "personal preferences" then there isn't standard spelling, grammar, or anything else.
Hell in a handbasket, Paul.
He's just telling us that he's imaginary.
I think he is admitting to his belief in Hell.

What? You've never met a fore?

Leave the horsemen out of this.

I'm not usually into the whole 3-way thing, but you got me a little excited with that. - Skymama
BTR #1 / OTB^5 Official #2 / Hellfish #408 / VSCR #108/Tortuga/Orfun

[wmw999 2,123]

Quote

Leave the horsemen out of this.

What does an apoca look like, anyway? I'm assuming it's an awesome kisser, if it has four horsemen
Wendy P.

There is nothing more dangerous than breaking a basic safety rule and getting away with it. It removes fear of the consequences and builds false confidence. (tbrown)