Rhetoric or Substance?

In testing writing, what should we test for?

By Richard W. Paul

When I first read of University of California President Richard C. Atkinson's insistence that the SAT I include a writing component, I was pleased. After all, the ability of students to use writing in the learning process is essential to success in virtually every academic discipline. Essay testing is common in many subjects at the university, and a well-designed essay test can challenge students to integrate important concepts into an extended line of reasoning. Indeed, only when students can articulate in writing the basic principles they are learning in such fields as biology, psychology, anthropology, history, engineering, medicine, and the law can we be sure that they are internalizing those principles in an intellectually coherent way.

I naturally assumed, therefore, that when President Atkinson called for an SAT writing component, he envisioned such a component to be analytic, intellectual, and academic in nature. I was surprised, then, to find that the writing to be tested on the revised SAT is that emphasized in some rhetorically oriented composition courses, with an emphasis on style, variety of sentence structure, and rhetorical principles.

The fact is that rhetorically powerful writing may be, and in our culture often is, intellectually bankrupt. Many intellectually impoverished thinkers write well in the purely rhetorical sense. Propaganda, for one, is often expressed in a rhetorically effective way. Political speeches empty of significant content are often rhetorically well-designed. Sophistry and self-delusion often thrive...