In 'Assessing' Writing, Speed Kills

By Will Fitzhugh

An earlier version of this essay was published in the author’s blog on May 16, 2012.

Modern man (and woman) is very interested in speed, on land and sea and in the air, but also in “scoring” student writing, it appears. The Educational Testing Service has noted the ability of one of its computerized systems to score 16,000 samples of writing in 20 seconds.

I should probably explain my bias against too much speed, and not just where it helps to kill thousands of people on the highway. Several decades ago, I took a speed-reading course from Xerox Learning Systems. I was given a pretest on reading and comprehension, and the tests after the course showed that I had doubled my reading speed—and cut...