THE ROLE OF INTERNAL STANDARDS IN ASSESSMENT OF WRITTEN DISCOURSE

Writers evaluated works in progress to make critical editorial decisio ns about content and style. It is proposed that this evaluative proces s is guided by a writer's internal standards, which define when writin g is correct, appropriate, and complete. An analysis of the internal s tandards concept leads to the prediction that the match between the st andards of the writer and the standards of readers should be an import ant predictor of how the reader will evaluate the writer's work. Two s tudies are presented to test this prediction. College freshmen and exp erienced readers from a well-defined discourse community both rated th e quality of a set of short texts. Later the same readers evaluated wr iting samples obtained from each student. Writing samples from student s whose judgments of good writing matched those of their readers were rated significantly higher than the writing of students whose judgment s disagreed. The results are related to the importance of writers' int ernal standards in the writing process.