Week 2 review

Review of Rosemary L. Hake and Joseph M. Williams- "Style and Its Consequences: Do as I Do, Not as I Say"

Hake and Williams' experiment was fascinating to me. They hypothesized that although teachers overtly claim a preference for a clear, direct verbal style of writing, they implicitly award higher grades to the wordier, more pretentious nominal style instead. Their quandary was to prove it- for they could not seek the data they needed if teachers were aware of what the researchers were seeking. Basically, if the teachers became aware of the true nature of the research, it would activate their overt preferences for verbal style. The researchers needed to structure the experiments in such a way as to allow the subjects to respond naturally, thus demonstrating whether or not they truly reward the verbal style they claim to prefer.

To maintain a balance, the researchers provided the subjects with pairs of essays. Each essay was identical to its mate in every way save for style. They "were identical in number of paragraphs, number of sentences; in organization, logic, and content. They were identical even in such matters as handwriting and deliberately created errors in spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage, errors we placed in identical positions in each member of each pair of papers... The styles differed in ways that we might subjectively define as direct vs. indirect, simple vs. complex, wordy vs. concise, inflated vs. plain, etc" (435).

The researchers conducted five experiments in this manner. In each of these experiments, the data showed a preference towards the nominal essays as opposed to the verbal ones. The exact percentages change in each experiment due to variations on the experiment, some driven by the researchers, some not. In the second experiment, for example, the teachers realized what they were likely being studied for, and their results fluctuated as a result. Nonetheless, they still demonstrated a preference for the wordy, nominal papers that utilize "that inflated, prolix, indirect prose that all English teachers claim to condemn but that seems to flourish" (436).

Ultimately, the researchers theorize further about the variations in nominal preference- they found upper level college composition professors to be more discriminating. They only marked a nominal-style essay higher than its verbal counterpart if the nominal paper had quality content. In paper pairs lacking quality content, the professors demonstrated a preference for the verbal. "Apparently, a nominal style and intrinsic quality reinforced one another: profound style = profound content. But they perceived a nominal style in an intrinsically bad paper as a mismatch, as an attempt to cover up an absence of substantial content with pretentiously inflated language" (440).

The high school teachers' data indicated that, regardless of the quality of the essay, the nominal style "so strongly bespoke verbal dexterity and implied intellectual maturity" that these teachers awarded these papers with higher scores (440).

Ultimately Hake and Williams state that these findings are unsurprising, and they go so far as to suggest that a "heavily nominal style is an inevitable development of an intellectually mature culture" (446). They also call for a look into our own psychology or history to determine if we can better generate strong writers through teaching or if this increasingly nominal style is inevitable.

I was a bit offended at their suggestion that high school teachers are "unsophisticated," but their research does open a number of teaching concerns that we need to focus on. This article was also quite fascinating- I want to read more on this sort of research!