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Notes

Expressive Cognition — Verbal Reasoning Profile

MethodWhy We Grade Writing Instead of ReasoningOn the historical compromise that is finally coming undoneA teacher returns a stack of essays and recognizes that two of them are nearly identical in quality of writing, but only one was produced by a student who understands. The grades will be similar. The thing the teacher actually wants to grade has no place in any of the records.Verbal ReasoningFluency Is Not What You Think It IsOn the difference between sounding right and being rightThere is a small experience that happens to most people occasionally and that nobody gives a name. You are listening to someone speak. You feel persuaded. And then, an hour later, you try to reconstruct what they actually said, and you discover that you cannot.Verbal ReasoningWhat the Cold Call Was Always ForOn the long history of putting someone on the spotIn Plato’s Meno, Socrates asks an uneducated slave boy a question about geometry the boy could not have answered alone. By the end of the dialogue the boy has produced a valid proof. Socrates calls this recollection. We would call it construction under questioning — and we have been doing it for twenty-four hundred years for a reason.Verbal ReasoningWhat Verbal IQ Tests Actually Measure (And What They Miss)On vocabulary, reasoning, and the difference between knowing and thinkingMost verbal IQ tests measure vocabulary knowledge or reading speed. They are tests of what you have learned, not how you think. Here is what they miss — and why it matters.Verbal ReasoningReasoning is the JobOn Jensen Huang and the case for measuring spoken thoughtThere is a word Jensen Huang uses with unusual frequency when he talks about how he runs NVIDIA. Not vision, though he has that. Not execution, though NVIDIA's record on that is difficult to dispute. The word is reason.Advanced EnglishThe Articulate Non-Native SpeakerOn multilingual reasoning and the instruments that fail to measure itA student who reasons sophisticatedly in their first language does not lack cognitive academic language proficiency. They lack the English-language vehicle for expressing a capacity they already have.How to Measure Verbal Reasoning — and Why Most Tests Get It WrongOn the gap between processing language and generating itThe way you reason and the way you perform that reasoning under pressure are not the same thing. And almost no assessment tool measures the difference.The Thought Before the SentenceOn speech, cognition, and what we fail to measureEven a speech prepared down to the last clause becomes, in the moment of delivery, a different kind of act. Something is happening that composition alone cannot account for.Verbal ReasoningSix Things Your Speech Reveals About How You ThinkOn spontaneous speech and the architecture of reasoningSpontaneous speech reveals the architecture of a person’s reasoning in ways that written language, carefully edited conversation, and standardized tests do not. The signal is in the structure, not the surface.