Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers

at the Bottom

Richard H. Haswell

The number of categories in holistic rating scales varies a good deal, from as
few as three to as many as fifteen. What remains constant is the uniform way
scorers conceive of the bottom-most cubicle. Essays settled there almost always
have the highest concordance of scores assigned independently by raters, high-
er even than have the topmost essays. Apparently those performing holistic
ratings-usually teachers of writing-agree better on who are bad writers than
on who are good. This strikes me as a curiosity worth a closer look.

Organizational Preferences of Writers

Recently in this journal I reported on an analysis of the logical organization of

impromptu essays written by freshmen, sophomores, and juniors in college
and by workplace writers eight years or more out of college ("Organization").
The essays had been rated on a holistic scale of 1 up to 8 by seven young uni-
versity writing instructors, averaging two-and-a-half years teaching composi-
tion in college and two years in the schools. Their assessment is a typical ex-
ample of the way independent scorers tend to agree most on those essays they
rate lowest. Out of ninety-six student essays, the nine with an average rate of
2 or lower had very little spread among their seven rates: three of these bot-
tom-most essays received rates only of 1 and 2, five received rates of 1 to 3,
and one rates of 1 to 4 (the mean standard deviation of their rates is 0.75). By
comparison, of the nine top essays, all with an average rate of 7 or higher, five
received rates of 6 to 8, three of 5 to 8, and one of 3 to 8 (the mean standard
deviation of their rates is 1.06).
It takes no more than a glance at the bottom nine essays to see one possible
explanation for this difference of concurrence in assessment. The writing sam-
ple had tapped all composition classes at a land-grant university which, at the
time, offered no special courses for students with severe writing problems. So
it is no surprise to find these bottom essays displaying the characteristic fea-

RichardH. Haswell is a professorof English at Washington State University. He is cur-

rentlyworkingon a book-lengthstudy of writing developmentduringthe college years.
College Composition and Communication, Vol. 39, No. 3, October 1988 303

Copyright © 1988 by the National Council of Teachers of English. All rights reserved.

National Council of Teachers of English

is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve, and extend access to
College Composition and Communication ®
www.jstor.org
304 CollegeCompositionand Communication39 (October1988)

tures of that kind of writing still sometimes labeled "remedial" or "incompe-

tent." They are halt with mechanical errors, quirky in paragraphing, scant of
title and topic sentence and introduction and supportive elaboration and other
reader amenities, and backward in production, averaging 196 words compared
to 364 for the higher-rated student essays. Perhaps "remedial" writing is easy
for evaluators to categorize because it bears, or bares, its earmarks flagrantly,
on the surface.
What is totally a surprise is the showing of these "incompetent" essays in
terms of my original analysis of organizational patterns. As Table 1 shows,
compared to the eighty-seven student essays higher up in the scale, these nine
basement essays performed more like the working-world essays, which had
been authored by employees chosen precisely because their supervisors had
deemed them "competent" writers.

Table 1

Analysis of Organizational Patterns

Student Student
Writers Writers Workplace
Pattern Logical Parts of Pattern Rated 3-8 Rated 1-2 Writers
Collection Overlapping categories 10 0 0
Classification
Mutually exclusive categories 12 0 1
Degree Categories that rank 5 0 1
Development Stages that evolve chronologi-
cally 10 0 2
Comparison Categories that compare or
contrast 6 2 2
Causation Cause and effect 13 0 3
Process Procedure and goal 0 0 0
Inference Premise and conclusion 4 2 5
Choice Options and final choice 10 1 2
Solution Problem and resolution 2 0 3
Dialectic Antitheses and synthesis 6 1 2
Causal Chain Chaining of cause and effect 2 0 2
Sorites Chaining of premise and con-
clusion 2 1 2
Sequence Chaining of parts of different
patterns 5 2 7
87 9 32

My earlier paper explains this particular measure of organization fully. As-

pects relevant to the present discussion will become clearer as I analyze some
texts later, but for the moment it is enough to notice how the higher-rated
students tended to gravitate toward the first seven patterns and the "incompe-
tent" students and "competent" employees toward the last seven. A fourth of
Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 305

the higher-rated students chose to divide their subject into static, categorical
parts (collection and classification), a decision made by none of the bottom nine
and only one of the older employees. Only around a third of the higher-rated
student essays followed what could be called progressive or argumentative for-
mats (inference through sequence), strategies adopted by three-fourths of the
lowest-rated and three-fourths of the employee essays.
Of course, my measure does not claim to describe anything definitive or
privileged in discourse organization (texts are shaped many more ways than by
just the logical), nor does it assign any necessary rhetorical value to any partic-
ular pattern or patterns here. But still it offers one systematic and concrete
way to chart organizational performance, a way of seeing that uncovers logical
structures which often underlie extended pieces of writing, and that discovers
logical connections which teachers sometimes overlook. Its primary value is
diagnostic. So if initially the measure found that, in one kind of organization,
lowest-rated student writers stand closer to professional writers than to better-
rated students, then we may be justified in looking with some suspicion on
that uniform holistic rating of "lowest" and in looking, beneath the surface of
error and ineptitude, a second time at the way these nine bottom essays are or-
ganized.
Here is one of the nine, exactly as written. I have diagrammed what I take
to be the main logical organization.

Physical appearance or attractiveness needs to be down

INTRO- played in todays thinking. The obsession of people worrying
DUCTION about their physical appearance creates prejudices. Many peo-
ple through out time have been caught in the appearancetrap.
Many jobs requir some physical attractiveness, such as:
Stewards; stewardesses; and models. Some employers will not
hire over weight people, short people, or tall people with out
LOGICAL judging their ability to produce the work which is required of
CON- the job. Many of the people which are rejected for work be-
CLUSION
cause of their physical shape or uglyness might be just the peo-
ple suited for that particular job. JTake for instance an over
weight woman wants a job as a stewardess. Many over weight
people have found that to over come their social block of their
shape, they have to be more out going, more talkitive and
have more general knowledge. A person who does not have
this disability and on the other hand is pleaseing to the eye
would not have this maturing strugle. The poudgy stewardess
SUMMARY might make a better personality that the thin attractive one.

The top-level pattern is inference: SINCE struggle forges talent, and SINCE
unattractive people struggle more than attractive, THEN unattractive people
may be best for a job. The writer has made this logical construct remarkably
306 and Communication
CollegeComposition 1988)
39 (October

difficult to see. The premises, mislabelled as an "instance," follow the conclu-

sion, the introduction misleads (do the "people" of the third sentence turn out
to be the employers, the applicants, or both?), and there is no paragraphing to
graph logical boundaries. Yet when the logical sense is finally made explicit,
one peculiar behavior of this short piece becomes evident, how rapidly and
how far the writer's thinking presses on: There is a social block against over-
weight people; Therefore employers worry about physical appearance;Also there-
fore many jobs require attractive employees; Also thereforeoverweight people
must struggle harder; As a result they are often talented; Converselyand com-
parativelyattractive people are often less talented; As a combinedresultsome em-
ployers reject people without testing their worth; As a resultthe best person is
not hired; Thereforegenerallypeople should downplay physical appearance.
So analysis by logical organization reveals a character which distinguishes
this piece from much impromptu student writing: highly compressed sequen-
tial logical meditation. This is certainly not a characterone expects to find in
"remedial" writing, yet other of the nine bottom essays divulge a similar de-
meanor. For the moment, let's avoid terms connoting deficiency or proficiency
and call this a "lean" style. Obviously, when carried to an extreme, as in this
case, lean writing will generate excesses in need of remediation.
Such an extreme encourages one to look for its opposite, a stylistic exorbi-
tance, one presumes, equally in need of remediation. In my sample it is the
500-word impromptu theme based on a gimcrack partition of the subject,
typically an unconsidered enumeration of parts (collection)or a division into
simplistic stages (developmentY-withtop-heavy introduction, truckling sum-
mary, restatements and examples of every common point, boxy paragraphsall
of a size. It seems to have everything but ideas that spring one from the other
in a fecund sequence. Let's call it extreme "stout" writing. It is concerned not
with the following out of ideas but with the settling in of ideas, not with
search but with insertion.
At the other end of the holistic spectrum, among the nine top-rated stu-
dent essays, is one I would call an extreme of stout writing. In five paragraphs
and 521 words, this essay argues that physical appearanceplays "an important
role in people's attitudes"-not an argument, it seems, the writer has many
doubts about, or expects the reader to have many. Analysis of logical ordering
again locates the excess. The essay sorts its subject into three main cabinets:
"youth and dating," "males and females," and "society." Collectionis the right
name for this method of arrangement. The categories seem erected indepen-
dently of one another (they are taken verbatim from a list of suggested topics
in the essay prompt). And the way they so blatantly overlap suggests they are
serving essentially as preset catch-alls, not as a sequence where one category
logically evolves from another.
This essay shows its stoutness not only in its main logical pattern, but also
in embedded patterns. Here is its fourth paragraph(the third cabinet):
Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 307

And last, we must deal with physical beauty and it's effect
on society.lAs you all know, outward appearanceand charm is
PART #1 very important in the political scene. As was true in the Presi-
A dential election of 1960, the candidate with the most charm,
T best image, and best physical appearanceoften wins.[People go
on ridiculous diets and spend money hand over foot in order to
PART #2 lose weight and be "beautiful" again.lAnd even more sadly,
t people with physical handicaps are often stared at or rejected as
if they were some kind of monster carrying a communicable
3 disease. |It often seems as though Brittania Jeans, Pierre Cardin
industries, Clairol, Faberge, and Vidal Sassoon have complete
control over the minds and bodies of the United States of
America. Evidence of this can be found in all of us.

The paragraph builds up another collection, encasing again three items taken
from the prompt. Of its seven sentences, three serve as introduction and re-
statement. On even further embedded levels, it generates, by my count, six
more logically overlapping collections ("stared at or rejected"), one feeble degree
("even more sadly"), and two causations. Rhetorically the paragraph feels solid,
but part of that feeling owes to the extreme simplicity and stasis of the logical
relationships.
By contrast here is a paragraph of about the same length from one of the
bottom nine essays. It functions as the entire body of the essay, accompanied
only by a two-sentence introductory paragraph.

Girls in Highschool that are overweight never

get asked to go to a dance. Although these girls
may have the appearanceof having a pretty face it
is just because they are overweight. To the guy he
may think of being laughed at by his friends.
Even when these girls come to college thing will
never change. When these girls go out with their
friends to get picked up in a single bar, usually
the girls that are not overweight will get picked
up, whereas the girl that is overweight will not.
You'll never find an overweight girl competing for
the Miss America or Miss Universe. There is a lot
of drawbacks for these girls. They may think it is
some kind of handicap.j Girls must have special
w clothing to fit themselves. When they go out to OPTION #1
SOLUTION eat or just standing in a lunch line, they asked for .
the calorie-cutter. Even for blind dates, girls over- T
weight are turned down.jThere's no other alter- OPTION #2
THESIS native but for these girls to stay home. But I un- 4r
t derstand that these girls try there best to compete CHOICE
ANTITHESIS with girls that aren't overweight and beautiful. [
V V I
308 and Communication
CollegeComposition 39 (October
1988)

This paragraphis anything but static, forging on from a problem with a failed
solutionthrough a choiceof options to an unresolved dialectic. The logical rest-
lessness spreads to embedded levels, where I count two degrees,six comparisons,
four causations,and two inferences.
Both paragraphssuffer in a sense from the same problem, a radical sketch-
iness in conveying a complex reality. But I think it may now be clear why, in
terms of the organization of these two attempts, the method of the lean para-
graph has more appeal to older, more competent writers. There is simply
more interest and potentially more reward (even if more difficulty) in working
out the implications of an idea than in merely storing in support for it.
Mapped out by my analysis of organization, the employee essays tend to look
more like the lean paragraph, only with the logical segments filled out. No
wonder. Imagine having to expand the stout paragraph, retaining its main
logical compartments.
I am not going to hypothesize a motive for extreme stout writing (although
it is tempting to do so by citing the second sentence of the example above:
"As you all know, outward appearanceand charm is very important in the po-
litical scene"). But I am going to hypothesize a modus or rationale for extreme
lean, since this student style has been little recognized. First and last the writ-
er wants to work out the logical ramifications of an idea set by a teacher. But
tracking logical trails and inferring where they lead takes time. Minutes pass
between the writing of one proposition and the acceptance of its implications.
Flow is lost, sometimes even grammatical and syntactic linkage. Most easily
left behind unrecorded are logical steps because it is the logical end itself that
is being most ardently pursued. The writer certainly does not want to be side-
tracked with information tangential to the main logical path, such as back-
ground, definitions, restatements, summary, illustrative examples, rhetorical
color, or emphasis.
Holistically, the essay providing the example of stout writing above got
nearly the top combined score from my seven teachers, with rates of 8, 8, 8,
8, 7, 6, and 5 (standard deviation = 1.21). The essay providing the example
of lean writing got the very lowest, with rates of 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, and 2 (stan-
dard deviation = 0.49). The curiosity here is not the judgmental gap in over-
all quality between the two. The piece of stout writing surpasses the other in
enough ways-in mechanics, cohesion, emphasis, support, etc.-to warrant
the difference. What is curious is that the individual rates of the lean piece are
so uniform. With the stout essay, some raters may have sensed the weakness
of the organization, but no one seems to have been aware of the organizational
strength of the lean.
We are back to our original curiosity. If the nine bottom essays and their
lean style were truly written by "disabled" students, then apparently one of
their disabilities is in getting teachers to see such abilities as they have.
Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 309

The Wit of Bottom Writers

Logical organizing is not the only area where the bottom essays as a group
matched more nearly the performance of the competent non-academic writers
than did the higher-rated essays. Another area I can only designate by a term
somewhat outmoded today: verbal wit. Here the bottom nine ally with the
employees in a style of shrewd or worldly practicality. This again is perhaps a
surprise. Not only impromptu essay tests but also quick-answer, SAT-like ex-
aminations tend to put bottom writers down. When juniors or seniors in high
school, these particular nine writers earned an average score on the verbal parts
of a state-wide diagnostic which placed them in the bottom 15% of their
class. But wit has more to do than with the semi-colons, spelling demons, and
learned words of such high-pressure, verbal competition, and the stylistic out-
put of shrewdness and practicality may take forms below the habitualized
threshold of the composition-teacher vision.
It does not take much re-reading of these nine short essays to catch their
peculiar verbal intelligence. They appreciate the power of street-wise, face-
slapping words: "Your just not good looking enough so bug off." Their sen-
tences can be refreshingly brisk: "Conduct codes are created to protect people
from criminals." Their ideas are often more compressed than one is used to
seeing in student writing, in class or out: "The obsession of people worrying
about their physical appearance creates prejudices." (Clauses in their essays
average 10.3 words, equal to the achievement of the older writers and a full
word higher than that of the other students.) They relish the thrust of syntac-
tic parallelism: "The age has little to do with the fact, but much to do with
the morals of society." (Their parallelism rate is 20% higher than in the other
student essays.) They often attempt a dry, sardonic humor: "Even for blind
dates, girls overweight are turned down," or "Quite often these people are
overlooked because they are fat." Their metaphoric language stands close to
life: "Young adults clinging to their family," or "Caught in the appearance
trap," or "Some overweight people are like dark shadows, they are there, but
are never really noticed." And throughout they show an unusual honesty, not
the fact-slinging of one power at another, but the disinterested sooth-saying of
the outsider with little to lose: "Am I so ugly I can't get dates?" or "We are
all criminals." All in all, the mark of the individual is maintained more tena-
ciously in these nine essays than in the other eighty-seven.
I am going to hypothesize a modus or rationale for this kind of verbal wit.
First and last the writer feels noncompetitive. Thinking oneself out of com-
petition prompts the freedom and devil-may-care unhurriedness from which
flow writing characterized by introspection, humor, laconism, and that pithy
irony with which the rustic jives the city-goer. "The recklessness which makes
for originality," writes Edward Hoagland, who not incidentally is a stam-
merer, "often grows out of despair" (188). Or, in reverse order, the idling
310 College Compositionand Communication39 (October1988)

anomie of the noncompetitor may produce good patches of writing and poor
scores on verbal tests, both through a refusal to reck-to reck convention and
consequence.
Both noncompetition and competition are deep motivations for writers.
The second, of course, is much more familiar to most of us. We assume our
writing vies, not necessarily is better than that of others, just in the same
league. We first get accepted by a journal in our profession, then look to see
whether we made lead article-and the first step is entirely distinct from the
second, for the second is to see if we have made a certain grade, the first is to
have made the grade. But with bottom students, noncompetition may be more
familiar. Even if they have not been put out of the regular classrooms and into
special cubicles, they still know they do not compete with their peers. The
coach can't fool the player at the far end of the bench, who probably regrets
the effort of having suited up and adopts that distrait, cut-off, sitting-in-the-
audience slouch of those who are inside but not in. This is the vital and some-
times deadly meaning of "competence"- if you have it you are allowed to
compete. If you don't, you live beyond the pale, outside the normal grades of
society, in a bottom-most category so different it forms a class of its own and
cannot be judged by the same standards. Students in special classes for bottom
dwellers do not get grades, or the grades do not mean the same as normal
ones. They are there because they did not make the grade in the first place. So
what they write is slovenly, broken, and graceless, humorous, involuted, and
honest.

Complexity at the Bottom

We return again to our initial curiosity. Bottom-most writing-either the

writing itself or the teachers' conception of it or both-seems to reside in a
kind of tidy world apart, unendowed with the lively ambiguities of higher
beings. One of the curiosities here, then, is why so unstratified a block of our
population has attracted such a diversity of labels: "slow," "remedial," "dis-
abled," "deficient," "developmental," "basic," "novice," even sometimes (sot-
to voce) "blockhead." Of course our culture also cannot agree on one name for
the sorts of people who show up at unemployment centers. Yet the two popu-
lations do not entirely compare. Perhaps we may hesitate as little in deciding
who should be sent to the writing centers, but we are apparently still fuzzy
about the essential condition that leads writers to such a fate. Are they laggard
in need of prodding ("slow"), lame in need of prosthesis ("disabled"), lacking
in need of supplies ("deficient"), sick in need of cure ("remedial"), under-
developed in need of catching up ("developmental"), well-based but in need of
cultural refinement ("basic"), or new to writing in need of experience
("novice")?Or, sotto voce, just dumb?
Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 311

The answer is that bottom writers may not be any of these, or may be any
combination of them. Many teachers have offered a rationale or modus for the
kind of writer who ends up at the bottom of verbal tests or holistic ratings:
lack of confidence, fear of writing, confusion with an unfamiliar culture, fixa-
tion in the security of a pre-formal cognitive stage. Surely where these nega-
tive motivations obtain in the ordinary bottom student, they are mingled, and
are further mingled with positive motivations, such as the two we have been
looking at, a devotion to the pursuit of ideas, a fondness for the play of verbal
wit. But as we have seen, the ordinary bottom holistic score does not reflect
such a mingle. For teachers the danger lies in the fact that a single analytical
approach-whether it be a measure of logical organization, a count of clause
length, a writing anxiety test, a spoken protocol, a Piaget or Perry scheme-
will tend to discover a single motivation. Compounding this danger is the
other fact that the error-riddenand unstylish surface of bottom writing glares,
shields the depths where the complexities are. Teachers agree on what consti-
tutes the worst student writing not primarily because they recognize it easily.
They recognize it easily because they have simplified it.
And that has something to say about the academic fate of writers who have
penned themselves into the bottom stall, through whatever excesses of fear or
confusion or thoughtfulness or honesty.

What Fate for Bottom Writers?

Montaigne, the least competitive of all the great outsiders, noted that the
honest is more lovable than the useful. Still my fondness for bottom prose
must admit its ineffectiveness under the set conditions. Noncompetitive may
not mean incompetent, or lean mean lacking, but they certainly mean a rotten
grade. Selective quotes, and a deliberate setting aside of skills like punctua-
tion and coherence, cannot hide the fact that, in the end, these writers have
more to learn than the other students do about sharing thought. They mutter,
stutter, mislead, skim, and omit, often wretchedly.
My analysis suggests a little-used pedagogy, that a teacher can help them
along by pointing to those skills they already have where they actually surpass
the student above-their grasp of concrete language, their effective compres-
sion of syntax, their truthfulness, their wit, their feeling for metaphor, their
finding out and tracking down trails of thought. Students at the bottom must
think of themselves not only as "shadows" but as "dark shadows," as worse
writers than they really are. If they can be shown that they top other students
in some ways, they may regain that vital sense of competition.
But therein lurks a vitiating cajolery. With the competition come the
rules, with the rules the compromises, with the compromises losses. The lei-
surely and time-consuming search for logical ramifications will have a difficult
312 CollegeCompositionand Communication39 (October1988)

time fending off the academic demands for bulk, high readability, and orderly
pigeonholing. Even more bleak looks the fate of the down-turned wit under
the gaze of academic solemnity, or the worldly slang against the Latin legions
of polysyllables, or patient and compressed syntax caught in the rush for
length. Surely the fate of bottom writers during the first years of college is
often a retreat from familiar impediments and an advance toward uncomfort-
able accommodations.
I cannot think of any more difficult task of a teacher than to find ways to
block this retreat while still advancing the writing of these students. The
most direct way would show them how competent adults use some of the con-
ventions that assist readability and production, yet still maintain the wit, the
honesty, the gritty vernacular, the progressive organization-as in this piece
from a 458-word employee essay:
Mom alwayssaid you had to sufferif you wantedto look good. So we
torturedourselves with girdles, outrageouspointed-toed shoes, smelly
padded bras, overbakedperms. We even went around for a few years
looking like the bridesof Draculawith our white lipstick and nail polish.
And then came bee-hivehairdos,sprayedbrittle. No wonderfashionre-
belled and went naturalin the 70's. What a relief!
And yet I and my beautyvalues system can't go "natural."I have to
forcemyself to find the "beauty"in the "beast,"and when it happens,as
it so often does, once againI walk the treadmillof being ashamed.
The bottom skills could be identified and praised along with titles, examples,
and correct spelling. Sequential logical structures hidden in lean in-class writ-
ing could be diagrammed and, while the writers continue such exploration of
ideas in impromptu essays, the diagram could be used as a plan for a more
fully elaborated out-of-class essay. Sophisticated sentences and patterns could
be taken from the "basic" writers and taught to the others. Truly "develop-
mental" students might need to regress-to go back, begin over, and practice
elementary techniques that they somehow bypassed, as in the psychotherapy
that had adult patients crawling around in diapers. For my bottom students I
suspect more would be gained with the older, nondiscriminatory therapy of
leading from strength.
Actually, prior to instruction, in one way teachers ought to discriminate.
They ought to further sort apart the unfortunate who have been sorted into
the bottom, to distinguish lean from noncompetitive from second-languaged
from dialect-languaged from culture-shocked from what Janice N. Hays calls
"suburban basic" (145), and so on. Annette N. Bradford suggests tests in
thinking to screen the "cognitively immature," a procedure that at least
might keep teachers from confusing "slow" minds with what is just slow writ-
ing. Actually, what I suspect such a testing would show- assuming it has
some workable validity- is little or no correlation between "backward"writ-
ing and "immature" thinking. Against the number of studies which have ar-
gued that basic writers lag in cognitive maturity (see Patricia Bizzell's 1982
Dark Shadows: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 313

review), one ought to set the caution of two researcherswho ironically did so
much to further the very notion of cognitive maturity, Inhelder and Piaget:
"Verbal productions can by no means fully account for the structures of intel-
ligence" (246, fn. 1). One ought also to ask how closely the verbal produc-
tions of writers deemed basic have been scrutinized for structures of intel-
ligence. As we have seen, my "remedial" writers here, in terms of logical
ordering structures, compare better with matured post-graduates than with
their college peers. The paragraph of lean writing (bottom of p. 307) may
seem innocent of nearly every writing convention, but its final position of un-
certain, unresolved dialectic is unusually sophisticated for a college student, at
least according to some studies of post-formal adult development (e.g.,
Basseches; Labouvie-Vief; Murphy and Gilligan). As teachers, we should deep-
ly question any inference about intellectual maturity based only on skill in fol-
lowing writing conventions.
The conventions themselves, in fact, could stand some questioning. Mina
P. Shaughnessy, Mike Rose, and others recommend teaching university con-
ventions to "novice" students openly and systematically. There is a healthy
pragmatism in this, but such pragmatism could use an equally healthy dollop
of skepticism, or at least an awareness of the price paid. Should stoutness, for
instance, be a necessary convention of in-class writing? Richard Ohmann has
shown how "specific details close off analysis" (391), and I would add that in
the confines of an hour or two-hour placement essay, extended analogies, re-
statements, clever introductions, and other of our beloved crutches for the
reader, even perfect spelling and punctuation, may also disable good explora-
tory thinking. In her observation of revision practices, Glynda Hull noted that
her "less skilled" writers, compared to her "more skilled," focused more on
errors of meaning and less on errors of surface form, and that they more often
"expressed a concern for making a text literally true or accurate" (25). If, as
she suggests, writers with such a focus and concern show less skill because
they have "not yet learned to distinguish between matters of necessity and
matters of choice," then maybe university writing teachers ought to start
making truth and accuracy in writing more of a necessity and surface form
more of a choice. Andrea Lunsford found "basic" writers using the first-person
more often than "skilled" writers do, Sandra Stotsky found "poor" writers
creating subjects of sentences simpler than those of "good" writers, and David
Bartholomae found "developmental" writers often attempting "syntax that is
morecomplex than convention requires" (254). But greater use of the first per-
son and simpler subjects and more complex syntax all characterizethe writing
of my "competent" workplace writers in comparison with my undergraduates
as a whole (Change).Maybe we should start encouraging different conventions,
ones that more nearly match those of the non-academic world, even if they
produce lower inter-rater reliability coefficients on holistic assessments.
We return a last time to the odd conformity among teacher ratings of bot-
tom essays. Without any doubt, changing of the standards by which English
314 CollegeCompositionand Communication39 (October1988)

teachers judge student writing is a political matter of growing urgency as the

import of writing itself grows more and more beyond departments of English,
across the curriculum and into the marketplace. But if it is a matter I will not
broach here, that does not mean that the phenomenon I have been looking at
is an idle curiosity. Let me be blunt and say that high concordanceon low ho-
listic scores looks awfully like stereotyping, which is never an idle phenome-
non. So there is another change English departments ought to encourage, and
continue to encourage regardless of what writing standards we operate under,
and that is to put less weight on accuracy of assessment and more weight on
keenness of diagnosis. Diagnosis of writing is an act richly intuitive, distur-
bingly complex, and fateful. For the student's sake, we ought to study every
turn we take there. When we notice one lack, do we sometimes create an-
other, deficiencies hiding proficiencies? Does the very act of seeing an object
as complex as writing require categorizations which belie that very complex-
ity? What tacit operations does the judicious discrimination of diagnosis share
with the prejudicial discrimination of bigotry?

A Counter-Assessment

In the 1830's in England, the epithet "pauper"usually carried with it a one-

dimensional meaning and often a more unpleasant fate. To be a "pauper"was
to be placed in a time-honored, almost mythic journey to ruin: rich man, poor
man, beggar man, thief. As "rats"and "parasitesof the state," "paupers"were
assigned to workhouses to pick oakum and cobble roads, were separated from
spouses and children if married, were jailed if in debt, and if dying were
sometimes carted by night to be discarded beyond the bourns of their home
parish. In that decade journalist William Cobbett (another great outsider) reg-
istered a telling protestation: "What is a pauper? Only a very poor man." In
Cobbett's line, it is important to see, the word "Only" simplifies in order to
allow for the multi-dimensionality of the word "man."
What is a student at the bottom? Only someone who needs to learn a lot.
But not everything. "Poor" writers do not deserve to be stripped of the pecu-
liar skills they already have, nor enrolled in some imaginary one-way intellec-
tual journey. The group in the nether cubicle is not sui generis or unstratified,
but is as eccentric as any other. No doubt teachers with more experience than
the ones who rated my bottom essays recognize more variety in bottom stu-
dents, and English teachers in general certainly recognize more variety there
than does anyone else in society. It seems unfair to compare the conception
and treatment of writing students at the academic bottom today in the United
States with that of people at the economic bottom in England in 1830. But
then it may be unwise not to compare the two. Let's take that piece of history
as a measure both of how far we have come and of how perilously near we
stand, and take Cobbett's protestation as a kind of assessment, or counter-
assessment, we must keep making over and over.
Dark Shadows.: The Fate of Writers at the Bottom 315

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