The role of internal standards in assessment of written discourse

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