We
all have passed through that phase in school when we used to wonder why one
could score a centum in Mathematics, Science or Economics but it was a mandate
that no student could score one in the languages papers. Thus, it would even
make one ponder why there was a maximum score of hundred at all. Could words
stringed into eloquent sentences, disregarding factual merit, ever be
translated into a numerical value?
What
then could be the rationality behind writing assessments? All writing should
strictly adhere to the rules of grammar, prose or standard protocols for
whatever category of work they fall into, which by the way, evolve more rapidly
than we know. For instance, mobile phone text messages and social networking
sites hardly adhere to this scaffold but are more widely read, “liked” and
circulated than Shakespeare ever would have. This trend exists almost
everywhere, except for pure literary work. Evaluation of a piece of writing on
this basis serves as an excellent screening method, but here and there, its
popularity may surpass its grammatical value, which, therefore, is an obvious
hiccup in even this time tested procedure.
Nevertheless,
once this framework is established, the work essentially has to be creative. It
is important to lend some colour to a collection of words with “a”, “an” and
“the” at just the right places. A good piece of writing is not just
understandable, but necessarily doesn’t elicit a yawn. But that alone, may not
suffice as a good assessment parameter. Litterateurs may swear by Elliot and
Dickens but the average teenager is more likely to find them plain boring.
Creativity is established from different perspectives. Just like one may adore
a Michelangelo at sight but rather progress only gradually from disgust to
acquired understanding of Picasso’s “Dora-maar”, writing is a multi-culinary
recipe. One just has to lend the right taste at the right time. A writer, no
matter how skilled, may not qualify the assessor’s examination if their style
is not quite to the examiner’s liking.
The art of writing is
not tangible to be evaluated. Conventional writing assessments do not justify
the latitude that literature offers to writers. Moreover, rigid evaluations
create the risk of a literary homogeneity, which is a bane for any culture or
language. However, if writing is assessed disregarding personal tastes and in
as unbiased a manner as humanly possible, it may fairly reflect a writer’s
skills. Beyond that stage, the best possible system in today’s scenario is
peer- review of work. People with similar styles, tastes and sensibility form a
panel of examiners may assess only that particular type of writing, therefore,
allowing heterogeneity to flourish. A method of assessment should be
constructed, that could possibly offer some scope for eccentricity; which is a
must for anything in nature to evolve and survive.
