Hi, Bill: It's your word "mechanics" that prompts this response! > In any case, all of this illustrates the main point of my comment--that > teachers, process approach or not, are not using holistic scoring in their > day-to-day grading of papers. Thus it does not seem reasonable to blame > holistic scoring for any decline in students' ability to use mechanics. . . . But my comment is aimed at the earlier part of this discussion. Note that the original Hamp-Lyons article alluded to here (and I do hope to read it) dealt with ESL students. As one who often works with *very* basic writers, I am in a similar position: My students' problems with the written language cannot accurately be dealt with if one conceptualizes them with a term like "mechanics" -- or "proofreading" or "surface features," for that matter. And while I agree that assessment and instruction should be separately addressed, they are nevertheless intertwined. Holistic scoring is an old and familiar practice at CUNY schools; all faculty members in English have been seasoned scorers of the WAT (the CUNY Writing Assessment Test), socialized to score in the same way, etc. A subtle component of that socialization is an understanding (not articulated, but it could/should be, it seems to me) that all errors are not equal. That is: some kinds of errors will vanish in time. E.g., the tangled syntax of ambitious sentences. Some errors disappear with a little teaching and practice. E.g., sentence boundary errors and punctuation errors, for most students. But other errors foretell a long rocky road ahead: Those that suggest interference from spoken language that has not yet been reduced by sufficient reading/writing practice, those that suggest dyslexia and other serious problems with *reading*. The WAT has been a fine instrument for placement as long as seasoned teachers were reading it. We tended to be relatively forgiving of errors in the first two categories but to take those in the third so seriously that students who committed them were placed into basic writing courses -- where they could receive appropriate instruction aimed at written language development -- even if the ideas and organization of their WAT essays were relatively strong. And we never did think the WAT worked well with ESL students, even for placement. (1) Is the kind of experienced reading I just described a violation of holistic scoring principles? (2) What are "mechanics," anyway? :) Carolyn Kirkpatrick York College/CUNY [log in to unmask]