At the beginning of the quarter in week 2, we practiced grading introduction samples for the Context Project. What was most noteworthy was how even though the class had not yet received much direct coaching on our upcoming paper, we all still graded in a remarkably consistent fashion; almost 85% of the class was able to correctly identify why one intro was more persuasive than the other. The fact that we all could know and understand which intro was more effective without explicitly being taught why proves that writing does indeed exist in the realm of objectivity. Even though it may seem that writing is always subjective and “up to interpretation,” the group grading helped me realized that it is more accurate to say that there are concrete skills that can produce predictable results. The skill I noticed the most that was lacking was specificity which took several different forms in the writing itself. Some moments of vagueness were easy to spot, and John labelled them problematic plurals: in the red highlighting below, we can see words like “actions” and corporations” which obscure meaning and harm the writer’s effectiveness because they are essentially forcing the author to try to figure out something that is missing.

This will be duplicated