The Perfect Score Project, Week #8: Is that “Good Writing?”

Math gridlock this week (Mean, Median, Mode) — but it turned out that THE BOOK had printed the wrong answers (arrrggggg), so I was chasing my tail for nearly the entire week…..

While I waited for Catherine to enlighten me, I decided to take a peak at the SAT reading and writing sections.  Given that I’ve been in book publishing for over 2 decades, I have always assumed the reading/writing would be a piece of cake.

Wrong.

Take a look at this very typical SAT paragraph:

A cousin of the tenacious Asian longhorned beetle—which since its initial discovery in 1966 in New York City has caused tens of millions of dollars in damage annually—the citrus longhorned beetle was discovered on a juniper bush in August 2001 in Tukwila, Washington. Exotic pests such as the longhorned beetle are a growing problem—an unintended side effect of human travel and commerce that can cause large-scale mayhem to local ecosystems. To stop the citrus beetle, healthy trees were destroyed [line 10 begins] even though there was no visible evidence of infestation, and normal environmental regulations were suspended so that a rapid response could be mounted.

Note the lack of context and run on sentences.

When I read this, it makes me feel like my eyes are going to bleed…..

……and then all the SAT memories return:  That terrible distracted feeling when I was supposed to “CONCENTRATE” and “ANSWER THE QUESTIONS.”

Catherine and I went back and forth about the virtue of using this type of writing on the SATs, and whether or not it’s “good” writing.

My point was that writing is supposed to communicate, and if I’m having such a hard time understanding, it’s not “good” writing.  Complicated does not make for “good” (IMHO). For me, GREAT writing takes my breath away and compells me stop on a sentence and want to read it out loud.

As I write that right now, five authors immediately come to mind:  Joe Andoe, Tim O’Brien, Martha McPhee, Ian McEwan, Elizabeth Gilbert.

 

Catherine’s point was that college text books are filled with complicated sentences just like that, and shouldn’t we be able to understand them so we can understand great “literature” — Shakespeare, Homer, The Bible — for example?

Catherine’s point is well taken.

We finished the conversation by admitting that we’d probably grown accustomed to steady diet of junk food reading……which then led me to conclude that the Reading and Writing Sections on the SATs might not be the walk in the park I was anticipating.  Yikes.  

While I may be a voracious consumer of books (especially Business Books), I think that I might actually be just a “good” reader, and not the “great” reader I will need to be to get The Perfect Score on the SATs.

To read more about The Perfect Score Project, click HERE.

Wow…..has it really been 8 weeks?  Still having fun ;)