An Introverted Boy Against An Army of Label Makers

I wrote parts of this essay a few years ago, and left it on my computer. After reading Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts In A World That Can’t Stop Talking, I revised it in light of her findings. 

When my son was nine, I had to give him lots of warning. At about four o’clock on a mid-July day, I give Simon one four hours early.

“Remember, you have to do some work today.”

He sighs, says he knows, and continues scooting back and forth our driveway, alone save for seven or eight superheroes in his head, with whom he is developing plans to battle foes. Some he has invented himself—Electro has powers of infrared vision and telekinesis—and some he borrows him from the Fantastic Four encyclopedia he was reading earlier.

After dinner, he asks if he can play outside.

“For twenty minutes. Then, remember, you have to do work.”

He hurumphs, half-mocking, half-serious, and pushes his plate to the side. “I hate working! Why do I have to work even when it is summer vacation!”

Simon has a naturally happy disposition: “it takes a lot to get me sad,” he tells me. He  loves nothing more than endless free time: he reads a bit, goes outside and acts out what he has read, plays with his yu-gi-oh cards, helps me bake cookies. He has an overinflated vocabularly acquired from his superhero encyclopedias and a tendency towards abstraction that leads him to say things like and “Did you know that The Human Torch can psionically propel objects in the air to inflect fear in his enemies?” and “Location. I really like that word. Location,” while brushing his teeth. In fourth grade he told me he wanted to “invent something that the whole world needs. I need real science equipment. All my science equipment is fake. Once I invent it, how can we get the whole world to have it? Can we make it electric? I want it to be a technology!”  This Yom Kippur, he atoned “for not worrying enough about human suffering.” He has a best friend, and a step-sister whom sometimes delights him and sometimes annoys him. He always tests at grade level.

Simon also, for many years, struggled in school.

I realized Simon and school were going to be a troublesome couple when he was two and I enrolled him in a Montesorri pre-school. When I arrived for the parent-teacher conference, his teacher had laid piece of paper on the table. As I squished into the tiny chair by the sandbox table, I saw the paper was titled “Autism Diagnosis Checklist.” I sat down, pit in my stomach. “I think you might consider having Simon tested for autism,” she said. “He fits all the criteria on this list.”

The list included the following: has a hard time following directions; does not always respond when called; prefers to play by himself.
I pulled Simon from the school that day.

The Montessori preschool was the first in a parade of well-meaning educators who have told me they suspect something wrong with my son. I, in turn, suspect the problem is that he is a boy– a quiet, dreamy boy–and our educational systems are ill-equipped to meet the needs of such kids.. American boys, regardless of class, age or region, are doing more poorly in school than girls. Boys are far more likely to be diagnosed with learning disabilities. They do worse on tests and claim they do not like school. They are less likely to be admitted to college. If you are a boy who is not into sports and quiet in school, you are a prime suspect for “intervention.”

The next preschool I sent him to was concerned that his scrawls were unrecognizable, and suggested I have him tested. Kindergarten brought a handwriting intervention and more suggestions I have him tested. In second grade the art teacher called me to discuss the possibility Simon had a spatial perception problem and… suggested I have him tested.

I did not get him tested, because no one could convince me the murky “problems” they suspected were quantifiable. The answers to the test these teachers predicted kept changing, from autism to ADD, to spatial deficiencies to slow processing speeds to dysgraphia. I am suspicious of our current craze to label, diagnose and medicate children, particularly since those children are so often boys. I wonder if we are not simply stretching the definitions of disabilities so we can explain away what seems harder to teach.

Instead, I nurtured Simon’s natural proclivities—his interest in history, his creativity, and his desire for unstructured play time. After school and during the summer he is engaged, easily absorbed by his activities and content. During school, though, he was often miserable. He put it this way: “learning, good; work, bad.” Or just “I hate school.”

Finally, after another terrible year–he had to stay in for recess every single day of second grade to finish handwriting homework that was hard for him– I broke down and did have a battery of testing done. The tests gave me a bit of helpful information—Simon is naturally ambidextrous, and thus will never be a traditional learner or neat writer. He makes lots of careless mistakes. But nothing to warrant the money or stress spent.

At the beginning of third grade, I brought the results Simon’s teacher, and asked if he might be accommodate Simon’s needs.. He said he would try, but by January he was so frustrated with Simon’s daydreaming that he started forcing Simon to stay in during recess to finish assignments.

By then, Simon had internalized years of being told he is bad at handwriting to mean he was “stupid.” Any kind of writing– including putting on paper the things he makes up while playing–produced anxiety. We spend hours, many tear-filled, doing homework. And thus I started to give him warnings in  the afternoon to prepare him for after-dinner summer work.

For fourth grade I  switched him to a private school, one small enough to offer him attention, since he so often slips under the radar, and flexible enough to get to know what works for him, and what does not.

Simon is now in seventh grade, in the same private school, and his last report card was across the board positive, socially and academically. He still prefers to be by himself to being with other kids his age–sometimes he makes jokey comments about “kids these days, always on Facebook and twitter,”–and my old anxieties flare up.  But I just have to tell myself that he has always been this way–a dreamy, creative kid who likes and needs lots of time to himself.
Why has educating this amiable, bright and creative boy been so difficult? I have a phalanx of theories. He has never been a brilliant academic student (though he’s got brilliance, that’s for sure).  He always tests at grade level. Why could not his teachers in those early grades simply have considered him a B or  C student, and encourage to do improve, instead of seeking a diagnosis?  Our educational system seems to be smushing children, particularly boys, into a smaller and smaller range of achievement levels, due in part to the incessant assessments required by No Child Left Behind.

Another reason may be temperamental. Simon is introspective, and we are quicker to pathologize introspection than we are extroversion (again, particularly in boys). Sitting by oneself daydreaming about battles between heroes and foes seems to be problem rather than a character trait, albeit perhaps a quixotic one. Teachers add his shyness to his laggardly academics and solve for diagnosis, as if he were a story problem with a right answer.

Even worse, Simon never gets into trouble. His third-grade teacher—Simon’s first male teacher, whom Simon requested because of his gender– told me during our conference that he wished Simon would cause more behavioral problems, because he found it odd he never needed to be disciplined. Simon is also not the least bit competitive, so traditional carrot/stick methods of getting him to achieve fail. This further flummoxes teachers.

Any of these reasons may explain Simon’s early dysfunctional relationship with school. And if I turn the tables on the educators and ask what their behavior has in common, what “their” problem is with my son, I come up with one answer: they are troubled by Simon because of his gender and temperament. Our educational system has narrowed and finds it difficult to recognize diversity in the young males of our species.

I certainly still lie awake some nights worrying that I am in denial, that Simon has some gross deficiency not yet identified, and I am did him great a disservice. I worry constantly that I should limit his reading and solitary time and push him into sports and classes and social activities. But just when I am about to write that check for ice hockey classes I touch base with my instinctive sense of my son, this imaginative, overly verbose happy creature, and decide not to risk ironing out his uniqueness.  Until we can figure out more creative ways to educate and encourage introspective boys who are neither high achievers nor troublemakers—boys “in the middle,” like Simon–I will keep holding my ground, my breath and my tongue, and shoo away the well-intentioned label makers who cross our path.


Is That Lingua Franca I See In The Mirror?

Sometimes I think my career trajectory could be written this way: I was a graduate student and junior faculty member who loved nothing more than grabbing the new issue of Lingua Franca when it came out. It served as a necessary corollary to my work as well as the most exciting way to think about the goings on and implications of academia. I never considered writing articles like those in Lingua Franca, ever. But some things happened [plot turns, complications, blah blah] and I realized all I wanted to do was write articles like those in Lingua Franca.

In my always impeccable timing, this epiphany happened around the day Lingua Franca folded.

This week, Caleb Crain–a writer and intellectual I’ve always read and admired, but didn’t, like the writers for Lingua Franca, realize I also wanted to emulate– –has been posting the Lingua Franca archives on twitter (and, I just found out, Crain was also an editor there). Rescanning the Tables of Contents, I’m amazed how many other writers who I now look to as modeling the best magazine, non-fiction and critical writing out there today were writing those articles I read back in the day.

About a year ago some friends and I discussed launching a new version of Lingua Franca. We called it “Nu Lingua Franca,” because we’re very clever like that. A tablet? we wondered. Digital only? Why not? (To which others responded, sensibly, “Why? Do we need another new publication?” At which we all fell silent.)

Still, my nu dream job is to be a writer and editor of this fictitious publication. So I’m studying the archives, waiting for that angel investor to call. You should, too:

http://linguafranca.mirror.theinfo.org/

http://www.amazon.com/Quick-Studies-Best-Lingua-Franca/dp/0374528632/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329319192&sr=8-1

update: spurred on by twitter friends, I am sketching out ideas for making the above happen via Kickstarter. Wanna help? 

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

Winning the award for the longest time from pitch to publication is my story, Canon Fodder, which appears in the March issue of The Atlantic. It’s great to see this story, about the Harry Ransom Center’s collecting of contemporary author archives, come to fruition.

My piece on spelling in the February issue of Wired generated controversy. Grammar Girl and I had a twitter convo about it, which she wrote up in a blog post.  Poynter did a story on spelling and journalism pegged to my piece. John McIntyre of The Baltimore Sun wrote it up, and we had a fun exchange in the comments section. Unfortunately, he has since corrected the misspelling in the original post, so now my name is correctly spelled throughout. As you might predict, I received a good number of poorly spelled emails in response as well.

In other news, I’ve been working my way through some NBCC nominees–I just started Teju Cole’s Open City. I finally read James Gleick’s The Information which caused me all sorts of new thoughts about structuring and approaching the writing of smart non-fiction. I was greatly influenced in my reading of Gleick by the very smart, ballsy review by John Durham Peters of two similar books in the Los Angeles Review of Books. 

 

What about a Mid-list Non-Fiction Author’s Co-Op?

Okay, here’s my brainstorm.

Anyone who follows publishing or is a writer knows the problem, so I’ll skip right over that and onto my now 30 minute old idea: start a mid-list author’s co-op for publishing non-fiction.

Think about it: authors know how to market and promote already (or at least know that they should know about it). Mid-list, realistic authors know they will probably not get a huge advance. Ebooks are now wildly open to all sorts of new models, and print options are many, too. Distribution–well, there I get a bit stumped, but chances are there are some novel ideas out there.

With a co-op model, we could pool our various areas of expertise and/or interest in the publishing side of the business. With a profit-sharing plan (that could also help fund advances), we could keep any proceeds amongst ourselves. This is basically a group self-publishing idea:  authors collectively start a  business rather than all go off exploring self-publishing options.

On Twitter, Michael Elrad, the author of Babel No More (which I haven’t read but keep reading fantastic reviews of), threw out the idea of Kickstarter. I’m enamored of the idea of a core group investing start-up funds and then seeing if it can become self-sustaining.

Niche is always good, thus the mid-list non-fiction (which is, well, what I write, so natch). We could curate a list of smart, non-formulaic, engaging books, print and digital, published by authors who have some marketing and business savvy already and interested in gaining even more.

Those of you who know me know that I love to throw out big ideas that are wildly complicated to pull off. Sometimes I get convinced I’m crazy; sometimes I make them happen. Not sure which this teensy infant idea is yet. Thoughts?

What Is The Value of Literature? The Lessons of Hypermodern Firsts

What is the value of literature?

It’s a damned hard question to answer, if you are thinking about aesthetics. But I’m thinking about literature’s cash value here. How much is a first edition of a prize winning novel worth? A first edition of a novel that has been critically acclaimed (or a runaway bestseller) varies according to supply (how large was the initial print run?), condition and some difficult to parse variables. (for some reason, Michael Chabon has never been considered that collectible. Why? Who knows?)

A few years ago I wrote about collecting hypermodern literature, books published in the past 10 or 20 years. I’m slightly obsessed with this  lesser-discussed aspect of the book business.

Today I set up a story on ebay called Hypermodern Collectible Firsts. I put some of my titles up for auction, and a few for “Buy It Now.” I have first editions by Jonathan Franzen, a signed Lethem, a haul of Richard Powers firsts, and other. ( I know! I know! The photos are crappy and the listings could be better. But I’ve already spent  5 hours listing the books…What I’ve learned so far: selling books in time consuming).

I have done this once before. Last year, I sold books (a bunch of McSweeney’s, a first edition of Infinite Jest, a signed Thomas Wolfe) to raise money for a trip to Ireland that I took with my son. I managed to sell books to cover two international airfares. I was a bit wary of letting go of some title, but I realized I would much rather go to Ireland with my son than have the books on my shelf.

This year, whatever I gain from selling literature will go to my garden. My gardening hobby is expensive, and let’s face it: to take books and turn them into bags of peet moss, zinnia seeds, gladioulus bulbs–there’s something well-nigh literary about that.

Here is a back of the envelope ledger for what I’m selling and what I paid for them (I’ll keeping listings to this post). Also, as I sell books (*if* I sell any), I’ll add that information, too.

Richard Powers, 8 Firsts: the first hypermodern I bought intentionally as a collectible was Richard Powers’ first novel, Three Farmers On Their Way To A Dance. I bought it because I realized I had firsts of Galatea and Gain, and he may be my favorite living American author. I had read Three Farmers in paperback years earlier and loved it.  I think I paid about $50 or $60 dollars for this very nice first eidtion, and it is worth more now (maybe! I have not sold my copy yet).  Why is it valuable? Because it was his first, there was a small print run, and his reputation has grown to Pulitzer/MacArthur levels.  picked up the other ones along the way, or at used book stores.

Middlesex: Another early hypermodern purchase I made was Jeffrey Eugenides’ award winner. I remember how much I paid: $65.00. This fall, I bought a limited edition run of The Marriage Plot in a slipcase, part of Powell’s very cool Indiespensible program, also signed. I’ve bundled the two copies together in an auction that starts about at what I paid for the two.

Downton Abbey Tie-In! After I read Alan Hollinghurst’s The Marriage Plot this fall, and thought about how much I loved his novel The Line Of Beauty, I looked up the value of his titles (I usually go to abebooks.com to check values). There I found a signed first edition of The Line of Beauty also signed by Dan Stevens. Stevens, Cousin Matthew in the hyper-popular amongst the literati Downton Abbey, played Nick Guest in the BBC series based on The Line of Beauty. In a manic decision, I bought this book. I love it! I love that it is a strange form of popular culture celebrity. As soon as I placed the order, though, I had buyer’s remorse. I paid $300. Think of how many bags of mulch I could buy for that! So I’m flipping this copy. Will I make a profit?

Jonathan Lethem. I don’t remember when I bought a signed copy of Motherless Brooklyn–truthfully, I didn’t remember it was signed until I got my copy  to list it on ebay. But I do remember that right after Motherless Brooklyn received raves, I picked up first editions of earlier novels in used bookstores–one had a price tag from the Strand on it, another from Borders’ Half-Priced books. I bought Fortress of Solitude as soon as it came out. I reviewed Ecstasy of Influence for the Plain Dealer, and for that I got both a galley and a first edition as part of my payment. And like that, a mini-Lethem collection, one that the author, once a used-book clerk, might appreciate.

Michael Chabon. Another accidental collection. I read Mysteries of Pittsburgh way back in the day (when it came out), at my parents house in Madison, Wisconsin. For years, when I would go and visit them, I’d stay in the same third floor room and the spine was always prominent on the small bookshelf in the room. After Kavalier and Clay came out, I brought the copy home. I bought a signed copy of The Wonder Boys when I went to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair (why not? I couldn’t afford much else), and paid $60.00 (probably overpaid, if my abebooks research is correct). Yiddish I bought when it came out.

A Few Things I Didn’t List. I have a first edition, in fine/fine condition, of Muhammed Ali’s autobiography, The Greatest. How awesome is that? I should be worth a mint to a collector, right? Wrong. So I’m holding on to it. I didn’t list Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan first because it is beautiful, and I think will be worth more down the line. Same goes for signed copies of Metamaus and Fun House (hmmm….I see a trend). I have shelves of books that are written by friends or acquaintances and were signed to me by them, and I won’t part with of those.

update:

1 day  after I listed my first book, I have 0 bids. A few items have one watcher (who? who is this watcher? why of all places is there where the internet preserves privacy?).

–I decided to start the bidding on the signed ARC of Junot Diaz’ Drown at $5.00. I think it is worth at least $75.00, based on rarity, current reputation of author and his future value (it’s such a weird game, isn’t it!) Let’s see what happens. 

-2 days Lowering the starting price on the Diaz to $5.00 brought me my first bid, which is cool, but if no one else bids I’ll be selling it for far less than what it is worth, and will wish I hadn’t sold it at all. Not many perennials do $5.00 buy. :(  Otherwise, I have a same sprinkling of watchers. 

 

A Few More Words

Of course I anticipated lots of debate over my Wired piece on spelling. And it’s fun to read the differing views. I enjoy hearing comments and debating issues.

It is, I admit,  less fun–though also expected–to have my ideas oversimplified.  I do not argue we should “jettison spelling” or that we should spell “any word any way we want.”

What do I argue, then? If you want a thesis statement, I’ll pull out this one from the article: “We need a new set of tools that recognize more variations instead of rigidly enforcing outdated dogma.”

And example: if, after textisms take hold (and I argue they will, more and more), and a critical mass of people start using them and a larger group gets used to reading them, then writing “l8r” instead of later will not impede clarity or impede communication. Thus, we should be flexible about accepting this variation rather than decry laziness, stupidly, etc.

 

 

 

What I’ve Been Up To Lately

I have an essay in the February issue of Wired, “Use Your Own Words,” on spelling and change. Be sure to read the rebuttal by one of Wired’s copy editors, too.

I published reviews of Shalom Auslander’s Hope: A Tragedy and Alan Shapiro’s Broadway Baby.

Lygia Navarro published a charming piece, Touring the Homes of 9 Famous Authors which includes a shout-out to my book and this very sexy quote from me: “That’s what I’m attracted to: a ruin.”

For outtakes of my research on Cleveland’s garment industry, I created another blog.

I spoke with Ann Fisher of WOSU about handwriting in the digital age.

Progress has been made on a composition reader I am doing with Matthew Battles and Mark Sample tentatively called Culture 2.0: Reading and Writing Today for Pearson/Longman. If we all stay on track, the book will be out in 2013 (heads up, comp instructors!)

I also watched all of the Forsyte Saga, read up on ground covers and defended skeumorphs.

 

Computers And Social Media Are (Still) Books, But Twitter is Not

Look around you. Right in front of your face. On your screen. How many book-related terms can you find? I will start you off: bookmark, cut, copy, paste, desktop, notebook, clipboard, page, file, folder.

We understand computers through the imprimatur of books. When those first Dells and Apples started rolling off the assembly line, we needed some help understanding them, something familiar with which to navigate, conceptualize, and just plain figure out these then-revolutionary devices. So we drew upon books to structure our gradual accommodation to writing on computers.

We did the same thing to help people make the transition to the book.  Romans invented the codex, or a series of bound pages. Codices had advantages over the then-popular scroll.  A bunch of bound paper is easier to navigate than a scroll. Plus, you can write on both sides of parchment. Not to mention bulky papyri wrapped around wooden poles were none too easy to organize, store and access (Those of us who attend synagogue are reminded weekly of the physical limitations of scrolls.) But scrolls do have some advantages. Let me ask you this: are you getting a bit bored right now? Are you are reading on a screen, and want to check your email, but feel you should at least see where I am going with? Go ahead. Skip to the end.

Aha! What did you just do?  Did you, perchance, scroll?

It took centuries for people to get comfortable enough with the codex to finally give up (almost) on the scroll. As we have become acclimated to storing our documents digitally, we do not need those cute folder icons to help us figure out where to put files. Our children have fewer or no associations with cardboard clipboards and metal paper clips. We will slowly jettison these print-based metaphors for organic, computer-based ones.

Social media is also still a book—with one notable exception. Facebook (duh), Blogs (web “logs”) and email. But then we get to ….Twitter.

Aha!

update: after tweeting a link to this post, I was roundly schooled by several very smart book historians on my arguments above, which they convinced me overgeneralized print culture, books and, mostly, the crucial, contentious issue of filing. 

Responding to the SAT Essay: We Need Revolution Caused By Discontent

Imagine you are a 17-year-old high-school junior who plans to attend college. Take out a piece of paper and a pencil (not a pen). Absolutely no computers are allowed. Read the paragraph below and follow the directions beneath:

Although most people’s goal is to be happy at all times, being constantly satisfied and untroubled can actually prevent people from changing for the better. After all, why go to the trouble of changing if one is content with the ways things are? On the other hand, discontent often motivates people to make necessary changes. What revolution was not caused by widespread discontent? Who among us has not vowed to make a change because we are unhappy with some aspect of our lives?  Is discontent often the first step to action? 

Now: take 25 minutes to plan and write an essay responding to the final question. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your readings, studies, experience, or observations. You must handwrite your answer.

 

[25 minutes later]

Done? Now, ask yourself if you’d want someone else to read what you just wrote. Do you think a college professor might be inclined to throw your illegibly scrawled, ill-conceived collection of thoughts out the office window? You might find such a judgment unfair and wish to explain that the essay you wrote did not represent your true abilities or potential.

The above writing assignment came from the College Board’s ScoreWrite: A Guide for Preparing for the New SAT Essay. An impromptu, timed essay was added to the SAT in 2005.  The College Board claims the essay will provide colleges with a reliable indicator of student success and signal to high schools that they need to put increased emphasis on writing instruction.

The essay mirrors the kinds of writing asked of students in high schools, the College Board claims, helping writers understand the importance of audience, and helping them marshal support for their views. “There’s no reason the test should lead to formulaic writing,” he asserts.

But how else could a student prepare for such a daunting task other than to plug ideas into a formula? Hand writing a response in 25 minutes will result in superficial prose and the triumph of an already ubiquitous academic exercise, the five-paragraph essay: an –introduction that concludes with a thesis statement , three body paragraphs with supporting examples and a conclusion. The pressure to perform well on the essay adds another “teaching to the test” curricula in high schools (most states, including Ohio,require a timed essay on their required state graduation exams). Such high-stakes tests take time away from other more active, engaged  learning and leave incoming college students even less prepared for college-level writing.

What’s so bad about mastering the five-paragraph essay? College students who arrive with at least a five-paragraph model under their belts may be better prepared than those who arrive without it. But what college  writing experts know is that to improve writing, students need time to plan, reflect, and revise, something timed essays don’t allow. Further, students must feel connected to the topics they write about; writing for the sole purpose of demonstrating competency rarely produces strong prose.

Most important, learning to write is not like learning to ride a bike. As contexts and audiences change, writers must learn new knowledge, new rhetorical strategies, and new structures. That’s why high schools can never do what colleges  yearn for them to do. They can only teach high school students to write for high school, because that’s the community in which the writing occurs. Only colleges can teach undergraduates how to master our codes or academic discourses. High school and college writing differ, as does business writing from journalism, and technical prose from creative writing.

Further, someone has to score the SAT essays—an estimated 2 million a year. In the test’s first iteration, the College Board commissioned Pearson Education to oversee scoring. Pearson hired high school and college writing teachers, paying them between $17 and $22 an hour. Scorers were trained through an instructional eight-hour CD-ROM. (I once applied to be a scorer, but when I learned I’d be expected to score 220 essays in an eight-to-ten hour work day, or two to three minutes per essay, without breaks, and to agree to at least 30 hours of scoring a week, I balked.)

Scorers were encouraged to grade based upon the quality of examples students used to support their claims. The guidelines favor lengthy essays that use “SAT vocab” words and include elite cultural references. In the ScoreWrite pamphlet, for example, a top-scoring essay was lauded for using Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale “as an example of discontent motivating a society to make radical changes.” A low-scoring essay was faulted for weak critical thinking in its “appropriate but limited” example of Christopher Columbus. Essays that displayed an “impressive” vocabulary received higher scores. And though the College Board claims otherwise, longer essays generally received higher scores than shorter ones. That the essay must be handwritten provides another hurdle for some students. Messy handwriting, like an unprofessional type font, negatively influences the reader’s perception of the writer.

Even if studies didn’t already exist demonstrating that timed essays are neither reliable nor valid indicators of ability, it’s clear that no one can ace this essay cold. Performing well requires that students receive effective aids: well-trained teachers, books, Internet access, or best of all, a test-prep class. Unless these resources are equitably distributed, the essay exacerbates the educational gap in this country—exactly what the SAT initially set out to close.  

Originally administered in 1926, the SAT began as a noble experiment to create a Jeffersonian natural aristocracy, an intellectual elite drawn from the best and brightest, regardless of race or class background, through neutral testing. But it never realized that perhaps unattainable goal. Numerous studies have proven that the test is biased against minorities and low-income students. According to FairTest: The National Center for Fair and Open Testing, the average verbal score for African Americans in 2004 was 430; for whites, it was 528. Those whose families earned between $20,000 and $30,000 per year averaged 459; those whose families earned above $100,000 averaged 553.

All Americans should have the chance to be admitted into college. However, high-stakes standardized testing such as the SAT will not help achieve this goal. Just as high schools will never prepare students well enough for colleges, these tests will never measure student ability regardless of educational experience or family background.

If we really want to prepare students for civil society, we should give them the tools they need to think and learn and offer them meaningful, honest contexts for writing. One idealistic Jeffersonian ideal is still alive, if limping, in our country today: universal access to publicly funded K-12 education. What might we accomplish—what gains in knowledge and learning might ensue—if the energy, money, and talents used to create, modify, administer, prepare for, complete, defend, and critique the SAT and its revamping were instead directed toward improving the educational quality of our public schools? What, for instance, if we found a way to offer all students a chance to write, and write more often, on matters of importance for real audiences, and what if we provided them with teachers who had the time and training to offer them humane, individualized feedback?

The sample essays in the ScoreWrite booklet represented a range of ideas, examples, and rhetorical forms. However, they had one thing in common: all essays argued that, yes, discontent leads to action. The prompt is flawed: it is exceedingly difficult to argue that action rarely stems from discontent. The question sets up a false debate. So too does the SAT. The issue isn’t whether the essay is a good thing; it’s how we can better educate all high-school students in all schools, and how we can then teach those who choose college  to write like college students.

Time that could be spent wrestling with big ideas and playing with language is spent preparing all-purpose, highbrow examples and learning fancy vocabulary words. Let’s hope the millions who take the test will find a way to express their discontent. Maybe they’ll discuss their unhappiness with the SAT and suggest reforms. If so, we may find their essays surprisingly lucid, engaging, and sophisticated.

New Rules: Writing Well In The 21st Century

The other day, I posted this question on twitter: “How is your writing different today than it was 10 years ago?”

Here are some @replies I received:

@Mathitak, writer and editor
I write and edit pretty much exclusively onscreen now.

@JBJ, professor
It’s more relaxed, and less worried. More aware of the way audiences differ, but also overlap. (Nonacademic isn’t dumber.) “Informal” is part of it. Also, maybe more welcoming? (For ex: Quotes & links for conversation, not for defense.)

@Wynkenhimself, professor
It’s looser, I think. More assertions, less endless contextualizing. Also, I’ll end a sentence w a preposition now.

@Wynkenhimself @Jbj
Is it also easier to try smth new because you can revise in the next post? Less permanence/one-shot to get it right?

@Mathitak
Emails were a little more writerly and conversational back then, and my replies were more point-by-point responses. Emails now are more, er, mission-oriented—just one or two points to discuss, very functional.

@Forestoftweets, student
I’ve learned so much respect for verbs.

Then I asked the same question on Facebook, and received longer responses:

Mary Beth Hertz, teacher
Ten years ago I was a senior in college. I would type out whole paragraphs as a stream in Word and then cut/paste to put things in the order I wanted them in. I often did outlines on paper, though, so that I knew what I wanted to write about. Sometimes I would work out the opening few sentences on paper and then move to the computer. The only thing that has changed is now I have Google Docs for that….. I tend to need to get things out of my head all in one stream and then I go back and edit. Often, I work out the logic of things in my head and then see how they sound when they end up on ‘paper.’

Maggie Galehouse, editor
Now, I write first drafts quickly, and spend 80 percent of my time editing, tinkering and fine tuning. Ten years ago, it was the reverse.

John Schwartz, businessman
Ten years ago I was much more fussy and technical about grammar and punctuation. Now I often write “incorrectly” on purpose — comma splices, sentence fragments. Because it gives me a sense of having inflection and tone of voice. I will never again use a semicolon. It’s probably less interesting, but I also think there are also many small changes in syntax that have been caused by the computerization of conversation. For example, in a sentence like this one: Your password is “foobar”. The period has to go outside the quotation marks.”

“Foobar?” That’s all I could think about after I read John Schwartz’ response. So I did what I imagine many of us do three or four times a day:  I googled it. Turns out foobar is a term used by computer coders. So I responded to John:

“Ten years ago’foobar’ was not a word. And it would have taken me a lot longer to figure that out. ”

The last decade has seen a seismic shift in how people write. We have new words, like foobar. And we have new rules. These rules are not hard and fast “laws,” as in how to punctuate a sentence (although those are changing too, as John Schwartz notes) but more like manners, the assumed ways of doing things. We have new assumptions about what is and is not appropriate and effective prose. So to write well today means something different than it did them ten years ago, though many of the “laws” remain the same.

I chose ten years arbitrarily to refer to “the beginning of the 21st century”. By the end of the 20th century, many of us were using word processors to write, but we weren’t facebooking or tweeting, and few of us were blogging. We were probably not texting, and if we were, it was not on smart phones. We were emailing, but as @mathitak notes, the “rules” of email have changed since then.

There have been three major changes to 21st century writing: (1) writing is more informal, or “looser”, as @wynkenhimself puts it; (2) writing is more voice-driven, more personal (you can get a sense of what the people above are like by reading their tweets and Facebook posts, and (3) writing is more audience-specific. The tweets and Facebook replies above were composed as part of a conversation with a person or specific group of people (me, or me and all my and their twitter and Facebook followers). All were written to me particularly (and they knew when they wrote them that I am a professor of writing and a writer interested in new technologies. Their responses may have been different if the question was asked, say, by their children).  And, as @jbj and @wynkenhimself show, sometimes one reply to me leads to a new conversation between two other people.

It can be hard to know how to engage in this type of writing. You might feel a bit lost and unsure of the tropes of twitter, say. But chances are, you are more comfortable with writing than you were 10 years ago. Why? Because you do it more. Think about it. Today, you may text, email and Facebook dozens of times a day. In the 20th century, you may have gone weeks or months without ever writing anything (though you probably talked on the phone more than you do now).

For more on new rules, see:

Why You Should Stop Worrying And Learn To Use Emoticons
Forget Sounding Smart

F**k The Rules
Know Your Audience