I’m helping score the Analytical Writing Placement Exams for incoming UC freshmen this week. For those of you not familiar with the exam, 17 and 18 year olds who have been admitted to a UC wake up at some ungodly early hour of a Saturday morning, sit down, read a passage, and write an essay. It’s my job to look for things like sentence variety, organization and structure, arguments, analysis, and a general understanding of the prompt. Of course, multiple grammatical errors, poor variety in vocabulary, and numerous misspellings can hurt, but I can be forgiving for one or two misspelled words. After all, they don’t have access to spellcheck or wikipedia, and no one writes perfectly well without a chance to edit, especially on a Saturday morning when you’re 17.
The prompt this year has to do with socializing with strangers. One “error” I’ve seen in many essays (of a variety of skill levels, including those scoring “clearly competent”) is the use of conversate instead of have a conversation or converse. But is this really an error?
