Record S6 · 1979
S6: Humorous Letter
Written spring 1979; published in the December 1980 NAEP report. Age 17 in school; individual grade unknown.
Original student excerpt
If you are unable to send me a gold plated electric banana peeler which I must desperately have I would prefer you send any money back because for one thing I hate grapes and I don’t want a blue grape peeler. Every week I have had letters telling me that I would get my banana peeler but I have never recieve it.
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
- 3 of 4 — humor or linguistic play remains close to given absurdity. Whole-response humor primary-trait score; not a general writing score.
- Form
- Score Only; response-specific.
- Revision after feedback
- None survives.
Read the evidence coding
Conceptual claimIf the promised item is unavailable, the store should refund the money.
Ideas and relationships5 coded units. Condition, desired product, rejected substitute, correspondence history, and nonreceipt support the request.
AbstractionEmerging
Causal reasoningMultistep
Qualification / counterargumentGenuine Condition
Evidence usePrompt And Transaction Detail
OrganizationConditional Request Reasons History
Sentence controlMeaning Clear Uneven
Lexical precisionTask Specific
Articulation limitHumor and suspicion are asserted more than developed; clause boundaries are under-signaled.
These are descriptive codes, not scores. No composite or rank is calculated. Primary-trait score 3 represented 11.3%; competent but not population-average on a humor task where most papers scored 1.