QUESTION: What do you call a test in which bureaucrats rework the prose of great writers?

Answer: An abomination.

That's just what you have on a test required of high school seniors by the New York State Regents. Students are asked to read and react to work by Annie Dillard, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Ernesto Galarza, Anton Chekhov and others.

But it's not the work of these writers at all. Essential words have been changed and passages have been removed, leaving a new creation by anonymous sanitizers deployed to enforce sensitivity guidelines.

It's a foolish attempt to avoid offending anyone at best and a perversion of literature at worst. If you're looking for good thinking provoked by good writing, don't you have to start with good writing? It's not book burning or book banning, of course - those offenses are committed in the open by identifiable, if misguided, people.

Under a section of the guidelines titled Disability Considerations, a preparer of these tests must consider such questions as: Does the material degrade people on the basis of physical appearances or physical, cognitive or emotional challenge?

So in a passage attributed to Ernesto Galarza, a boy described as "skinny" became "thin," and another who was said to be "fat" became "heavy." A young woman who "went out with her mother to a bar" simply "went out."

In a speech, Kofi Annan, secretary general of the United Nations, praised "fine California wine and seafood." But mentions of alcohol (and bars) are verboten. The sanitized passage reads "fine California seafood." We're not making this up.

OK, someone ran amok with political correctness. But there's a broader point here.

If writers couldn't use language spoken by real people - if they couldn't record the world as they saw it - writing would become a fraudulent exercise. It would have no spark or spontaneity. Great writing cannot be sanitized any more than the Federal Register can be turned into a bodice ripper.

The New York Regents would do well to save themselves further embarrassment by taking the advise of their outraged critics: Feed the test into a shredder, along with the sensitivity guidelines that display such a gross lack of sensitivity.