CURSUS SCRIPTORUM: WRITING WITH HONORS Developed by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy for Scholars Online Preliminary Documentation Please do not redistribute Copyright © 2013, Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy INTRODUCTION This program is both a rigorous writing program and a game, based loosely on the model of the ancient Roman cursus honorum — the progression through the social and political ranks defined by the various offices in the Roman Republic. As such, it aims at providing both motivation and a focused and flexible tool for self-assessment and drill. We are also hoping it will be a certain amount of fun and will acquaint people as well with the structure of Roman society and culture. As the student plays the game, he or she will be represented by a fictional young Roman aristocrat climbing the ladder of political and military success in Rome. The character advances through various levels of play, each representing greater degrees of advancement across a number of levels of achievement. Each new level opens up a new range of exercises and tasks that can be undertaken. Each of those tasks will provide some points on a number of different scores. To enter each level, the student needs a minimum score each of fifteen specific areas. There are, altogether, twelve levels of achievement. If a student does not complete them all, that’s really not surprising or problematic. The program has been designed to enable people to gain from it at every level, and its upper reaches are accordingly extraordinarily demanding. Few if any students will ever reach them in the course of their time at Scholars Online. To complete the last of them, the student would have to have written and published a book. The lower levels, on the other hand, are quite accessible, and the student should be able to pass through them quite quickly. In the middle, the pace will slow down somewhat, the tasks will become more challenging, and there will be a constant check on the mastery of the basic elements of writing. The goal of the whole process is to let a student find his or her level and to work on the tasks that require improvement, rather than moving through a program in lockstep with other students who may not (almost certainly do not, in fact) have the same set of writing issues. It also attempts to push each student to reach a little farther and push a little harder against his or her own limits to achieve something better all the time. The goal is to achieve a genuine substantive mastery of the writing process rather than to hit and then abandon a fixed goal. Grading for the course as a course will combine an assessment of where the student stands relative to a norm for grade level, and also the amount of progress achieved along the way. SCORING AREAS Fifteen distinct scores are maintained for each player in the game. As we begin this operation, these will probably be collated manually by a teacher in a spreadsheet, but ultimately we hope to create a web-based reporting/scoring system accessible to both students and their teachers. The scores recognize and deal with two kinds of things. Most are general rule- or principle-based values, such as proper grammar, mechanics, sentence, paragraph and essay structure, thoroughness, logical correctness, and so on. Those are measured by the scores of the first ten categories. The second type are granular, particular things that cannot be dealt with on the same terms — specific spelling and usage issues, which are typically peculiar to individual words. The scores of the second sort measure these, and other indirect values. The next page lists these scoring areas. All the exercises in the game, whether very low-level drills or more advanced writing assignments, provide points in one or more of these categories. At the lowest levels, these will be automatic, based on performance; at the more advanced levels, they will be necessarily keyed to instructors’ assessments. Each of the scores in the first ten categories is itself a product of several decimal values ranging from zero to two. This allows arbitrarily fine gradation, of course, but the range of values hovering around one produces an interesting mathematical result. The rationale is simply that, as each curricular area is an organic whole, its parts are interdependent. Accordingly, all these scores are multiplied to create the score for the whole level, rather than merely being added. What does that mean, in practical terms? It means that you really need to achieve across-the-board mastery of each part in order to achieve the whole. If you know everything else about mechanics but still can’t manage a comma, you’re in some serious trouble. A zero in any of the sub-scores will zero the total for the simple reason that any number multiplied by zero is zero. A non-zero score below one will drag the product down. Compensatorily, a range of relatively high scores across the board (better than 1.5) will produce skyrocketing scores that will reward genuine excellence and make it conspicuous. The scores and what they mean: • Common Sense (CS): Basic mastery of terminology. • Savoir Faire (SF): Knowing your way around a sentence. • Tactics (TA): Mastery of mechanics (capitalization, punctuation, italics, etc.) and low-level organization of sentences. • Strategy (ST): Larger-scale organization of paragraphs, overall strategies for organizing essays. • Jurisprudence (DX): Manipulation of logical categories, avoidance of logical pitfalls. • Integrity (IN): Argumentative coherence and relevance — avoidance of “cheap shots”, internal contradiction, and extraneous materials. • Mindfulness (MI): Thoroughness of coverage, thoughtful exploration of opposing positions. Completeness. • Persuasiveness (PE): The use of rhetorical techniques to engage the reader and win a fair hearing. Pathos, ethos, and logos. • Charisma (CH): The somewhat subjective issues of elegance of style, verging on the poetic. Word disposition, rhythm, sound, and so on. • Diplomacy (DI): Adaptation of the authorial voice to the perspective of the hearer/reader, as relevant. • Denarii (DE): In the basic terms of the game, money. Used to quantify such issues as those surrounding spelling and usage. • Auctoritas (AU): In terms of the game, personal gravity and conviction. Of no critical role in the game, but reflects respect paid by other students in forum. • Potestas (PO): In terms of the game, raw power or might. Used to quantify power of expression. • Imperium (IM): In terms of the game, duly constituted authority. An indicator of achievement at the more advanced stages of the game, measuring tasks completed and credibility accumulated. • Clientes (CL): In terms of the game, clients. Used to measure assistance provided to other students in the process at the lower levels. SPELLING AND USAGE: DENARII The denarius was a normal day’s wage for a worker in ancient Rome. As such, it’s also the basic unit we’re using for the “money” score in the game. Rising through the ranks was a fairly costly affair; we’re not attempting to emulate that exactly (since there really aren’t, in the current version of the game, things for you to buy with the money), but instead we’re using money here as a way of controlling those things that are too fine-grained or idiosyncratic to treat as separate scores, but which do nevertheless constitute a large part of how a student’s writing is perceived. Each level requires a certain minimum amount of money to enter. As one’s level on the ladder of achievement goes up, so also does one’s ability to earn denarii. One can also lose denarii, however — and that’s an important part of the game. Here’s how it works. Whenever a student makes a new mistake in spelling or usage, it will cost nothing, but that error will be added to the student’s spelling or usage error list , where it will remain in perpetuity. It will behoove the student to address these issues immediately; if the same error appears on a subsequent assignment, it will cost a denarius; on another after that, two; on a fourth, four, and so on — the cost doubling each time a given error is made. The point here, of course, is that while such errors are relatively minor if the student addresses them promptly, they can become monumental road-blocks if neglected. Accumulated denarii are required to move ahead in the game, so this is significant. An error made multiple times in a given paper or exercise will be charged at the prevailing rate for each time it appears, but the cost will only double for the next assignment. Hence, if one misspells “definitely” three times in a given paper after having had it corrected twice earlier, it will be charged at four denarii, three times — twelve denarii. Were the same thing to happen in the next paper, it would be eight denarii, three times — twenty-four. And so on. THE LEVELS The twelve levels of play are as follows: I. Discipulus (Student): Here the goals are to get the basic terms of discourse onto the table. The chief game goal is the accumulation of CS points in twelve specific subject areas identified (loosely) with the Twelve Tables of Roman law. Along the way the student should also accumulate a few points in the SF area. II. Civis (Citizen): Here the goals are to master the basic moves of a sentence — nothing more. What makes a sentence work, in a strictly grammatical sense? What are the relevant parts of a sentence? How do they work? What things in sentences attach to what other things? Clauses, verb moods, pronouns and pronoun reference, and deployment of modifiers.