Record S5 · 1979
S5: Humorous Letter
Written spring 1979; published in the December 1980 NAEP report. Age 17 in school; individual grade unknown.
Original student excerpt
But I really wouldn’t need an electric grape peeler, because I don’t peel my grapes, I eat them, whole. I would also like to comment on your gold-plated electric banana peelers.
Two consecutive sentences from the handwritten response; original language preserved.
Prompt and conditions
Exact prompt. Sometimes people write just for the fun of it. We thought we would give you a chance to have some fun writing. Suppose you ordered from the Golden Fleece Mart, Ripoff, Wisconsin, a gold-plated electric banana peeler advertised for $1.98. Several days later you received a letter stating that the supply of gold-plated electric banana peelers was temporarily exhausted but that your order would be filled as soon as they received more gold. You have never received the banana peeler but every week since then you have received a letter assuring you that your order would be filled as soon as they received more gold. Now you have received a letter from the store’s manager, Mr. Jason Jones, informing you that they were unable to obtain any additional gold and that in the meantime they exhausted their supply of banana peelers. However, they just received a special supply of yellow paint and electric grape peelers and they are happy to inform you that your yellow enamel-coated electric grape peeler is on its way to you. Write a letter to Mr. Jason Jones. Space is provided on the next two pages. Have fun writing!
- Source conditions
- Prompt Facts No Sources; prompt scenario only.
- Time
- Exact duration unknown. timed; exact minutes not reported in the research input
- Production / archive
- handwritten; anonymous facsimile in 1980 report.
- Drafting
- timed first draft; no feedback revision.
- Population and selection
- National probability sample of in-school U.S. 17-year-olds; individual grade/geography suppressed. NAEP probability task sample; displayed paper purposively selected as score-point exemplar.
Scorer and feedback role
Institutional Assessor. Not an authenticated classroom-teacher feedback pair.
- Original source classification
- 2 of 4 — ambiguous discourse. Whole-response humor primary trait: neither clearly humorous nor clearly serious.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimThe substitute product is unnecessary because the writer eats grapes whole.
Ideas and relationships3 coded units. Offer, personal practice, and return to the original product support a comic refusal.
AbstractionConcrete
Causal reasoningSimple
Qualification / counterargumentConditional Refusal
Evidence usePersonal Detail
OrganizationRefusal Reason Transition
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionTask Specific
Articulation limitThe response gives little remedy or extension beyond the prompt’s joke.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Primary-trait score 2 represented 20.6%; its ambiguity concerns humorous uptake, not general writing ability.