In a nutshell: The kind of writing we do for the public is not the kind of writing that is privileged in the academy. Certainly, as Brotman found out, it isn't the kind of writing that gets top scores on the SAT.
Which leads me to wonder whether a one-size-fits-all standardized test like the SAT discriminates against kids who want to be professional writers.
I've been reading Brotman's stuff in The Trib for 10 years now. Among other things, she writes engagingly about the experience of raising kids in the city of Chicago. And in one especially memorable column when Mayor Daley and then-Gov. Jim Edgar were squabbling about a third airport (to supplement O'Hare and Midway), she interviewed day-care service providers about how they might go about helping the politicians debate the airport issue with more civility and maturity. Several, as I recall, suggested putting both the mayor and the governor in the "time-out corner." So when Brotman took the SAT, along with a college-bound daughter, and wrote up the experience in the June 11 Perspective section, I settled in for some enjoyable reading. She didn't disappoint:
Inside [the testing site], I stood in a stairwell, waiting to check in. In front of me, high school students yawned, downing breakfast bars and trying not to stare at the mom in their midst. The staffer checking IDs gave mine the hairy eyeball, but my name was on the list. I was in.The verbal (or "critical reading," as the SAT now calls it) sections Brotman enjoyed, "like doing needlework," and math, well, she survived it. In fact, she knocked the top off the reading test and did better than she'd expected in math. But her essay fell below expectations, into a range that "exhibits adequate but inconsistent facility in the use of language" and "has some errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics." If you write for a major metro daily, this isn't exactly how most people judge your work.
I took a seat in the back of the classroom and put on my reading glasses. At 8:15 a.m., we began.
Say what?
The essay was first. The question:
"Does the success of a community--whether it is a class, a team, a family, a nation, or any other group--depend upon people's willingness to limit their personal interests? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue."
And I thought--nothing.
Maybe there was something, a combination of emptiness and panic that swirled into a single thought: "Huh?"
Suddenly I realized that I, too, had stakes riding on the test. No one expected me to do well on the math. But how humiliating would it be if I blew the essay?
I got cracking. It wasn't anything to write Harvard about--how strange it felt to write by hand--but I used the words "relinquish," "communal" and "dovetailing." Take that, holistic scorers!
And then it was on to the next section. And the next, in a rhythm of test segments and brief breaks that was to continue for 4 1/2 hours.
So Brotman did what comes naturally for any reporter for a major metro newspaper (or a county seat weekly, for that matter). She worked the phone, got ahold of a spokesman for the firm that administers the SAT and started asking questions. Her problem, according to Edward Hardin, content specialist in English language arts at the College Board, was "sound bites." Here's how Brotman tells the story:
My nose was somewhat out of joint. Edward Hardin, content specialist in English language arts at the College Board, graciously put it back.Brotman summed up her reaction in one word: "Ouch." I would give it a little more than that.
Reached while he was meeting with six veteran SAT consultants to choose future essay subjects, he gave them my essay to read and grade again. Three gave it a 4; three gave it a 5 [out of 6 possible]. When he told them the author was a journalist, he said, they were not surprised.
My essay read like "sound bite writing," he said. "You have a lot of really interesting points and examples, but they tend to be one or two sentences, kind of scattershot. It jumps around a little bit, giving little chunks of information rather than sustained examples. There was some question as to whether it was building toward something or jumping around with random thoughts about the topic."
You see, the underlying structure of most good journalistic writing isn't sustained exemplification (to lapse into academic jargon for a minute) but narrative. When we cover an election or a three-alarm fire, we don't rush back to the newsroom and write an election essay or support a fire argument. We write a story. Our stories can be kind of scattershot, I'll admit, and sometimes they jump around a bit, because we're writing about people, and people's lives are like that. That's just the way of the world. But it all works out, because our readers need that narrative drive behind the story. If they don't get that sense of story from what we write as we cover the news, they move on to the sports page, the funnies or the school lunch menus.
"Story is the mother of all forms of of writing," says Donald Murray, a Pulitzer Prize-winning newspaper columnist who made the transition to academia as a professor at the University of New Hampshire, and has also written fiction and poetry. "Despite some intellectuals' lack of respect for traditional narrative, it is the principal way we all, intellectuals included, explore, understand, and explain our world to each other. We live and believe the narratives we have woven from our past and our experience. More than we realize, we see the world through story" (152).
But story, of course, isn't what they're looking for on the SAT.
It's not that there isn't a legitimate place for the kind of writing that gets kids a 6 out of 6 on the SAT essay. When I teach freshman English composition, I'm basically teaching argumentation, and it can be a struggle to get my students used to thinking in terms of supporting an argument with sustained evidence. But teach it I must ... even though I have to turn around and un-teach some of the more sustained academic windbaggery that goes along with it when I get the same kids as sophomores in basic newswriting. I don't pretend to be a rocket scientist, but somehow I manage to accomodate more than one style of writing in my students. I would recommend that attitude to the standardized testing industry.
It's as simple as this: Something is going badly wrong in the academy when a professional writer at one of the top 10 newspapers in the country scores in the "adequate but inconsistent" range on what is supposed to be a valid, reliable measurement of writing ability.
I've tried both academic and professional newspaper writing, and I would submit that good journalistic writing requires more craft and discipline than a lot of what passes for academic discourse (including my own). It's also been my experience that kids who are attracted to journalism have a pretty well developed flair for narrative writing by the time they get to college. Why? They like to read the papers, and they like to write the same kind of copy they like to read. So I am troubled by a one-size-fits-all standardized test that valorizes one style of writing above all others and penalizes the very students who are most likely to flourish as professional writers.
Brotman, Barbara. "Taking the SAT -- It's Not Just for Teenagers." Chicago Tribune 11 June 2006. Online ed. 28 June 2006. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0606110190jun11,1,7867589.story
Murray, Donald. Writing to Deadline: The Journalist at Work. Portsmouth, NH: Heineman, 2000.
