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Magnum One (Mid-American Digital) (Disc Manufacturing).iso
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TEACHESE.TXT
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1988-08-15
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In order to meet the second condition, that the analysis should lead to
direct improvements in a revision, even the measurements which do correlate
with essay quality need to be used with some caution. Research which
studies the relationship of revised essays to holistic scores should provide
more accurate guidance in this area, but our initial findings suggest some
starting points. Reducing the percentage of abstract words and spelling
errors can be accomplisehd directly and with measureable effect on essay
quality; however, students should not expect that direct changes in word
length, sentence length, or readability will improve an essay. The
correlation of average word length to quality, for instance, cannot be
directly addressed in revision. Substitution of lexical units for the mere
sake of length would change the data but not, necessarily, the quality of
the revised draft. Perhaps indirectly, through active experience of reading
and practice in writing which increase active vocabulary, a student could
meaningfully raise his or her average word length from the low mean (4.3) to
the high limit of 5.0. The fact that these measurements can be improved
only indirectly, suggests the overall importance of scribal fluency. Since
sentence length, word length, and readability are all measurements of
scribal fluency, the results of this study seem to suggest that more
classroom time should be spent on improving scribal behavior than on
practicing those discrete grammatical and stylistic elements which do not
correlate significantly with essay quality.