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A much lesser skill? It certainly is different, but how do you rank
different skills?
Analysis is very important for Technical Writing, I'm with you 100%
there, but without the ability to express what you learned, all the
analysis is worthless.
But on the topic of testing, it is always a tough nut to crack.
Designing a test to measure the skills you are looking for is not a
trivial matter. Sharon's approach is intriguing, and very qualitative
as opposed to quantitative. Quantitative testing (just give me the
score) has the appearance of being more objective then qualitative but
many times that appearance is deceiving. I've seen too many tests that
are filled with tricks.
It's kind of like the question "Why are manhole covers round?". That
may be a very effective test when asked to someone unfamiliar with it
to see if they can rationalize it out, but once it becomes common
knowledge, it is useless. BTW, in case someone hadn't heard that one
yet, I'll let you know that it is a shape that can't fall into the
hole. If it were a square, you could drop the cover down the hole by
setting it on edge and dropping in the diagonal of the hole.
On 12/11/05, Tony Markos <ajmarkos -at- yahoo -dot- com> wrote:
> This explains the fallacy of writing skills tests:
> You are testing for implementation skill - a much
> lesser skill - not for analysis skill. The real test
> is to ask the person being tested to create what
> he/she would use as input to text creation - not to
> create text.
>
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