Me, Ms. DeLuge, And The Macarena

By Bryan L. Jones

Invited to attend training in the "Six Traits" method of assessing student writing, I cheerfully declined. The prospect of a two-day immersion in the latest cure-all from the State Department of Meaningless Jargon left me cold. Our last state-sanctioned inservice, conducted by a "high-performance learning" ninny from Kansas City, still grated. Nothing like six hours of leaden lecture on the evils of lecture-style teaching to rub the old ganglia raw. Even the catchy Six Traits title raised suspicion. It reminded me of other checkout-line magazine nostrums: "Six Ways To Lose Six Pounds In Six Days," "Six Sure-Fire Ways To Keep Your Man's Attention," "Six Low-Cal Lunch Tips."

And what genius decided the English language could be broken down into six subspecies? Answer: The same genius who advises teachers grading student papers to assign the same value to content (Trait No. 1) as they do to conventions (Trait No. 6) or word choice (Trait No. 3). Creativity, a hard rascal for anyone to describe, let alone measure, receives short shrift.

I read the Six Traits background, then ran an Edgar Allen Poe short story through the rubric. Didn't bother with the more unconventional writer-wackos, the Thomas Pynchons, the Jerzy Kosinskis. The Poe piece didn't score particularly well. He got big points for word choice but fared poorly in organization and sentence fluency/structure. What a pity Poe's teachers didn't have the Six Traits tool to give him...