Generally, it is creative writing skill that shows the greatest variance. In fact, Woodford's table summarizing the results of the "direct measure" tests (Woodford, 1982, p.11) shows a relatively large standard deviation of 3.211 against a mean of 5.859 (on a scale of 0 to 14) for the business letter part. On the other hand, the standard deviations for the other two parts were relatively small (7.243 against a mean of 37.824 on a scale of 0 to 50 for the dehydrated sentence part and 9.406 against a mean of 64.033 on a scale of 0 to 75 for the translation part).