Qualities of good writing

On sensory examination of wines, Lachman was a master. He abhorred still wines of excess carbon dioxide. He writes of first, second, and third tastes. (But some of these are surely odors, not tastes.) Blending is considered the most difficult branch of the handling of wines. It should, he says, be assisted by chemical analysis. The judge must be in condition. He should be able to detect any blemish, and tell whether a wine has been corrected by use of lime, chalk, or salt. This tells us a good deal about the poor quality of wines of the period, as does Bioletti s letter (12). 

The quality of the measurement is only as good as the last clearly read number. No matter how obvious an estimated number may seem, it is not as reliable as the one your equipment actually provides for you. For example, see Fig. 2.1 and Fig. 2.2. If you want greater accuracy in your readings, you need better equipment, which provides more precise measurements. One safe way to indicate greater accuracy is to qualify a number. In the case of Fig. 2.1, you could write 6.2 0.2. The selection of 0.2 is somewhat arbitrary, as the length is obviously greater than 6.0, yet smaller than 6.5. 

It s all very well for those of us who write letters of recommendation for our students to stress the qualities of humanity that will make them good lawyers or doctors. And it s nice to think that admission officers are really reading our letters and looking for the extra dimension of commitment or concern. Still, it would be hard for a student not to visualize these officers shuffling so many transcripts studded with As that they regard a B as positively shameful. 

In the focus groups, we made the somewhat paradoxical discovery that asking participants to ground their discussions of qualities associated with good writing in specific places allowed us to make connections between and among those stories to more general qualities, (see Chapter 2)... 

Above, we mention what we found to be one of the paradoxical aspects of this project the theoretical framework (from Bawarshi 2003 and Huot 2002) suggests that qualities associated with good writing are site-specific, but our process had us taking specifics from one site and applying them to another (perhaps contradicting our premise that the site was important). 

After one more push—and with assistance from our colleague Gisela Ahlbrandt in the math department—we developed a final version of the assessment instrument. This version consisted of three parts. In the first, readers simply described their experiences with the portfolio, indicating what qualities associated with good writing they found to be present in the writer s work. We referred to each of these major qualities as keys so that we could ask raters to refer to the keys later in their reading/rating ... 

In the second section they rated the qualities associated with good writing in the work and, ideally, responded to a prompt that invited them to draw on qualities from the first section that led them to the assessment of the writer s work that they assigned. 

In the third section, raters wrote a letter to the writer about their experience of reading the work, again drawing on qualities associated with good writing from the first section. 

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