Adult education: Help Kathy learn to write
Recently, after reading one of plucky right-wing talking points flogger Katherine Kersten’s Star Tribune columns, the Mole decided to seek professional help–for Katherine Kersten.
So we selected one of her recent pieces, a November 6 post defending the waterboarding of war-on-terror detainees, and did two things: First, we ran the essay through Juicy Studios’ readability tester to see what grade level the composition attained: 6th grade. (Here’s a snapshot of the results; there’s a glossary defining all the measures at the link above.)
Second, we pasted the column into Word and emailed it to an English instructor we know who now lives and teaches in Alaska and has never seen Kersten’s writing before, with this prefatory note: “Could you help out a friend of ours? Kathy is a 50-something mom with grown children who’s going back to school and wants to be a writer…. I’m asking that you read the short essay I’ve attached, assign a letter grade to it, and write a summary feedback paragraph to Kathy telling her what she needs to do to become an accomplished professional writer. I’d really appreciate it, and I’m sure she would appreciate it too.”
Our teacher pal, Angela, has returned this critique:
Your sentence structure is fine, your paragraphing works, but your argument, frankly, reeks of oversimplified blather. For example, you imagine the following scenario:
“You have strong evidence that terrorists are targeting the Twin Cities for a spectacular mass-casualty act of terror.”
This reads like you’ve watched one too many episodes of 24. While it is important to try to get your reader involved in your writing, using over-emotional television plots to try to prove your point does nothing but show your own lack of an argument. Because you don’t actually have proof that this works, you are relying on a made-up scenario to try to change your reader’s position on this controversial topic. A way to improve this piece is to actually use a scenario where waterboarding works. You claim that it has worked, so using an actual example rather than a made-up one, would really be a better option for you with this piece.
Otherwise, your reader is just going to know that you’re full of it. One might point the same argument back at you. Six people are standing in front of you, it is up to you to torture all of them personally to see what information you can get out of them.
It doesn’t really work that well, does it?
You also use an insane amount of quotation marks around phrases and words.It makes you sound kind of “stupid.”
I’m going to give you multiple grades for this piece. For basic sentence and paragraph construction, I’ll give you a B. For your argument? D. Overall Grade: C.
16 Responses to “Adult education: Help Kathy learn to write”
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Frickin brilliant.
Two things:
1. Hilarious
2. I have a newfound fear of English instructors.
Awesome.
I’m certainly no KK fan, but in all fairness let’s see how TDM rates;
Summary Value
Total sentences 279
Total words 2500
Average words per Sentence 8.96
Words with 1 Syllable 1487
Words with 2 Syllables 617
Words with 3 Syllables 241
Words with 4 or more Syllables 155
Percentage of word with three or more syllables 15.84%
Average Syllables per Word 1.63
Gunning Fog Index 9.92
Flesch Reading Ease 60.21
Flesch-Kincaid Grade 7.09
—-
I’ve always suspected 7th graders always pick on 6th graders.
Mea culpa, upon closer inspection I see TDM is an 8th grader. Bully.
Awe-some.
Just for fun, I ran through a couple of today’s front page headlines. Grades 10 and 11.
Then I thought I’d compare Nick Coleman to Kersten. Also grade 6 - why in the world did they toss out all their good columnists for these hacks???
If Kersten really wanted to challenge herself, she could try using more than one source per column.
Kersten’s single sources have their own challenges with language. In today’s column, Kersten quotes Annette Meeks promoting her new “Freedom Foundation of Minnesota” think tank this way:
“But people are dispirited because they conflate election cycles with the health of the conservative movement, and they get their news from the Chinese water torture — the steady drip, drip — of the liberal media. ” (http://www.startribune.com/191/story/1579498.html)
A metaphor involving water and torture is probably not the best choice for someone trying to extricate conservatism from the morass of the Bush administration … unless it’s more than a metaphor. Knowing that Meeks has “drip, drip” on her mind, you shudder to think what she means by “aggressive outreach” at her new “think tank with muscle.”
The other question is whether Meeks ghost wrote Kersten’s column. Often you read something in Powerline, and a few days later a column with eerily similar phrasing will show up.
Best part:
“Just for fun, I ran through a couple of today’s front page headlines. Grades 10 and 11.
Then I thought I’d compare Nick Coleman to Kersten. Also grade 6 - why in the world did they toss out all their good columnists for these hacks???”
Nice ignoring of the fact that Coleman uses facts in context as opposed to Kersten’s using make-believe. Remember, the English teacher also graded on truthfulness, not just reading level.
Newspapers are meant to be read by the masses, and should not require a college degree for citizens to remain current on world and local events. If the writing there is not to your liking, you are free to seek other sources of information. I am not surprised about the junior high reading levels discovered for either Kersten or Coleman.
The part about the defective logic in proving a point is valid. It would be nice to run a Nick Coleman column by an English teacher as well, and then we’d be getting somewhere.
Not quite sure how to approach this, Steve. I mean, I’ve been a print and broadcast reporter (where you usually write to a fifth grade level), a writing teacher (”Writing for the Web”, in fact - we shot for 5th through 8th), a technical writer (ditto) - and writing *clearly* is not the same as writing “dumb”. Indeed, it’s a lot harder to write sparely, clearly and economically. Writing for public consumption much above that level is really either sloppy, lazy, academic, or exclusionary.
Or could just say “Prefatory note?” and make a face like I’m smelling rotting fish.
But I finally decided just to ask: If a conservative orders a pizza in the woods, and no liberal is there to hear it, is he/she still “reciting talking points?”
Eva:
Often you read something in Powerline, and a few days later a column with eerily similar phrasing will show up.
I know the feeling. I ofte see twenty column-inches of something in my comment section, and it pops up verbatim in your blog(s).
Doh. And then I read the “English Teacher’s” actual “critique”.
Three sentences of writing critique.
Five and a half paragraphs about opinions about torture and the literary value of her setup.
Your “english teacher” is to “teachers of writing” what CNN’s pack of Democrat foot-soldiers were to “undecided voters”.
(or, as the great sage once put it, “is this what passes for argumentation” around here?)
Mitch, Mitch:
She wasn’t issuing an opinion on torture. She is saying the argument is busted.
In other words, why are we always confronted with hypothetical situations in which we must decide whether or not to use torture to extract the truth?
Because all the evidence in real life points to the fact that it doesn’t work.
Kathy can’t produce evidence, so she appeals to our emotions with a scary story. Is that what passes for argumentation in your book?
Chris,
I don’t necessarily agree with Kersten’s scenarios or conclusions. Truth is, I don’t really have a “conclusion” of my own yet, and thankfully the world isn’t waiting on one.
I’m merely pointing out that:
a) tittering about the “grade level”
of Kersten’s writing is kinda dumb
if you actually take writing
seriously (not to mention
ironic)
b) If y’all couldn’t peg every
conservative commentator as a
“reciter of talking points” or
whatever, what would you
call them? Lazy!
c) If the “English teacher” was being
paid to “teach English”, Steve
didn’t really get his money’s worth.
The “writing critique” read more
like a D-list sorosblogger fisking.
I give it a C for style, and I’ll send it back “incomplete” so the “teacher” can actually answer the question.