Are writing assessments a good way to measure writers' skills?

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.