"Moderate" Writing

David Bartholomae's article "Inventing the University" noted an idea that I find interesting. He talks about how many teachers judge students' writing ability based on sentence structure and grammatical error and uses this to categorize them as a basic, moderate, or advanced writer. He says that "the problem with curricula...is that...the key distinguishing feature of a basic writer is the presence of sentence level error. (522) The problem with this system of judging pupils' writing is that the students with mistakes in their writing, no matter how good it may be otherwise, are critiqued as "basic" while writers with error free essays can get away with commonplace papers and still be classified as "moderate" or "advanced" no matter how basic and simple their composition turns out.