Style over substance

”Style over Substance” by John. S. O’Connor. This article discusses timed write using a prompt from the SAT a few years ago, “Style is more important than substance.” This essay begins arguing that the timed write is seen “as a snapshot of student writing at that moment,” and that “writing is not a process, but is in fact measurable in discrete stages” (52). The timed write assumes that students do not need to revise their writing to become better, but that what they wrote is already sufficient and correct. It pays no attention to the content and using the correct examples, instead focusing on the writing. The timed write sacrifices quality if the paper is coherent. Furthermore, O’Connor states that a timed write also adhere to specific implicit rules, such as no profanity, no pictures, and an address to the omniscient reader. O’Connor supports these ideas with an example of a student who wrote about Godzilla, using text and images. The student failed the assignment because the graders decided that he did not follow the traditional format and that he did not pay attention to his audience. O’Connor argues that the student did address the prompt, but in an alternative style rather than the expected 5 paragraph essay. The problem with scoring timed write is that each scorer is looking for different things and that there is no common standard to assess timed writes. 

I have always been a proponent of substance over style, though substance is much harder to teach. It depends on the students' comprehension skills and reading skills, while style can be reduced to certain sentence stems and structure students can reproduce on their own. A matter of teaching substance is having teachers focus more on content also, but where is the time to do it in our education system nowadays.