What is your best practice for responding to errors in grammar, usage, and mechanics?

INTRODUCTION

How should teachers address surface error in student writing? On this web page, several faculty offer solutions that work in their classes.

As we address error, we should first consider why errors occur. Of course, sometimes students simply neglect to recognize rules or proofread, but even students who have learned grammar and proofreading skills can overlook errors. Since Mina Shaughnessy’s analysis of error and Patrick Hartwell’s definition of grammar in the 1970’s, composition theorists from Constance Weaver and Rei Noguchi to Susan Hunter and Ray Wallace have been exploring the causes of error. What they have found is that students pick up many rules and conventions for writing standard American English throughout their years of writing instruction in elementary, middle, and high school. Yet writing remains for them a complex set of operations necessitating attention to countless details. Professors give students writing assignments that ask them to think critically, develop new opinions, and research unfamiliar information. When challenged to think and write in new, unfamiliar ways, students become so focused on what they are trying to say that they easily get distracted from how they are saying it. The result is error.

In addition to the “best practices” that appear below, we can mention a few here. To help make students more conscientious about correctness, we can require them to do weekly, independent reading assignments and exercises from their handbooks. These assignments simply give students practice by requiring them to take some time each week to focus on the most common errors, such as comma splices and fragments. Of course, such exercises do not guarantee that students will never make mistakes again, but they do put students in the frame of mind of being attentive to error.

When errors appear in their writing, other “best practices” address their needs. Rather than marking errors, we can simply put an “x” next to any line where an error appears and then require the students to locate and correct their own errors. This method is called "minimal marking," as conceptualized by Richard Haswell. All faculty, regardless of discipline, can employ this technique. If an error seems difficult to identify, the teacher can provide a hint in the margin of the paper, identifying the type of error to look for in that particular line or the section of the handbook the student should refer to.

For serious or repeated errors, the instructor can ask students to read aloud what they have written. As students read, they will stop themselves from time to time, discovering and correcting errors with little prompting. Writing centers commonly use this strategy.

What makes these practices work so well is that they temporarily reduce the distractions and focus the student’s attention to the construction of sentences. These practices also shift the task of editing from the teacher to the student, liberating the instructor from tedious marking of papers and making the student more responsible for surface correctness.

One practice that faculty in any discipline can employ is simply to figure correctness into the final grade of an assignment. By considering readability and presentation in the grade of a writing project, a professor can let students know that clear prose and correct format are valued not only in English, but also in every other field of study.

Perhaps the most effective solution in the long run is the writing process itself. Anyone who teaches writing is familiar with the student who submits a messy first draft but a polished final draft after putting their writing project through class workshops, teacher conferences, writing center sessions, and multiple revisions. The best way to help students iron out errors is to help them focus their topics, articulate their opinions, and develop and organize their ideas. When faculty help students refine what they want to say, students tend to make fewer errors in the way they say it. This is a learner-centered approach that is guaranteed to work almost every time.

--by JONATHAN S. CULLICK, DIRECTOR

PETER SCHIFF

Students can learn to edit their writing for mechanical effectiveness by contrasting surface feature usage in popular culture contexts with such usage in academic writing. Here are a few sample activities from some of my honors and advanced writing classes:

Roadside advertising signs ideally present messages that drivers can comprehend in passing. For example, an area bank sign promoted, “NO POINT HOME LOANS!” Students looking at a slide of that sign identified syntactic and mechanical features of the four-word text: sentence fragment, all upper case letters, and exclamation point. Most students understood that the context of “NO POINT” was closing costs. Other students admitted that they had thought that the bank meant that the loans were for any use, that is to say people could borrow money for their homes without having any particular purpose in mind. The key to the exercise was having students recast the sign using academic conventions of sentence structure, spelling, and punctuation. A sample revision was, “We are offering home equity loans without the additional closing cost of a percentage of the loan amount."

Product container text offers similar opportunities for linguistic analysis and application of student-derived understandings to academic writing. For instance, a high fiber cereal box text included the name of the cereal in italics and sentences beginning with coordinating conjunctions. Student questions about these usages offered me a motivational moment to refer the class to our writing handbook’s discussions of italics and conjunctions.

Baseball trading cards contain features that promote concise presentation of factual information. For instance, colons appear after the words, “Born,” “Home,” “Bats,” and “Throws.” Abbreviations for a pitcher’s height, weight, earned run average, and innings pitched save valuable space. Card text writers use marks of ellipsis to string together information about a player’s career. As with the roadside signs and product containers, students analyze surface feature usage and rework the card text into academically appropriate sentences.

After a few exercises of the sort noted above, students start to bring to class examples they have discovered on their own. In this way, students initiate their own dialogues on surface feature usage and the often-differing rhetorical requirements of popular culture and academia.

CHRISTOPHER WILKEY

If there is one thing I have heard over and over from my students, it is that they need to learn the “rules of grammar” in order to write well. Of course, sound grammar is an essential component of any piece of good writing, but there really is no universal standard for what counts as “correct” grammar usage in every given writing situation an author might encounter. In order to introduce my students to this basic insight that proper grammatical usage is largely rhetorical, I have designed a classroom activity that places student writing in two distinct writing situations. I first ask students to write a brief dialogue discussing a specific event between three individuals. I next ask the students to write a description of the same discussion, but this time in paragraph form and delivered second hand. As a class, we then begin a discussion about how the established standards of grammar usage are different in both pieces of writing and largely dependant on rhetorical issues related to audience, purpose, and genre. Through this exercise, students learn that the appropriate grammatical rules for writing sometimes vary across different rhetorical contexts and according to the distinct writing situation at hand.

KATE COCHRAN

Since study after study has proven that de-contextualized grammar instruction does not affect grammar usage in student writing, and that many grammatical difficulties can be discerned as “smart errors,” I navigate student grammar problems by teaching standard English like a second language and academic discourse as a specific dialect within that second language. Transformational grammar, which concerns itself primarily with sentence-level usage, is the theoretical basis for my approach. Taking common structural difficulties from student work, I ask students to work individually, in groups, and/or as a class to combine and decombine sentences and paragraphs to improve clarity, unity, and interest. For instance, after a first-draft writing workshop, I excerpt a few paragraphs from student papers to hand out to the class. I model and elicit suggestions for revision, usually identifying two or three major issues (e.g. the passive voice, subject-verb agreement, and choppy sentences) for the class to consider. The class then works in groups or individually to revise another paragraph. This method offers the students direction and collaborative support as they begin to consider their role in academic discourse. Not only are the sentences student-generated and open to multiple possibilities of revision, but the discussion of these sentences also helps students to bridge the gap between oral and written communication.

KRISTI EILER

Grammar is dry when discussed in a vacuum, so I look for more hands-on ways to help students recognize and correct mistakes. Our class keeps a running list of recurrent grammatical errors, and individual students keep their own lists of errors. Prior to each submission date, I conduct an editing and proofreading workshop. Following a mini-lesson on commas, fractured and/or fused sentences, and usage, students carefully read each other’s work and look for just those errors. After this general exercise, I ask students to read one another’s papers for most common grammatical errors. Although this approach does not eliminate all errors, focusing on only one or two does help students to clean up their copy without being overwhelmed and to recognize common college writing errors in others’ work as well as their own.

SALLY JACOBSEN

Students need thorough instruction in basic editing skills in composition. The principle I teach is that punctuation depends on sentence structure and signals meaning to the reader. My basic tool is a “Punctuation Made Easy” sheet that teaches “strong” punctuation between independent clauses and boils the “right comma” rules down to three and the “wrong comma” rules down to three. Students memorize subordinating conjunctions in order to recognize that sort of dependent clause. I take a full class period to discuss this in every class I teach, using examples from papers in that class—in literature classes, too. No paper receives an A unless it is A quality in editing. In advanced writing courses this semester, I tried a “total immersion” class period with the comma exercises in A Writer’s Reference. I am convinced that it is the responsibility of all faculty to teach students principles of editing in all classes—“to take students where they are and develop them from that point,” as Sue Adams used to say.

MARI YORK

I use games with my English 101 students in order to re-teach grammar fundamentals. I have questions that are straight out the handbook, A Writer’s Reference (Bedford/St. Martin’s Press). Students need to respond to the questions in a variety of ways from diagramming sentences to making up instant rhymes, raps, and songs. The board game includes various types of questions on parts of speech, punctuation, etc. A player can lose a turn or go to the “meditative grammar garden” if he/she does not answer the question correctly. The first one around the board wins. Students work in teams of two or three and use the handbook for information since the game is not meant to punish them but merely to reinforce or remind them of how grammar works. The winning team gets a prize and so do the others as a way of acknowledging the importance of the game and the work involved. Mentioning a prize makes them more competitive. I have made similar games for documentation and literary terms. I find games are an excellent way of encouraging students. They have a natural sense of competition, and if the games reward instead of “punish,” the students want to play them again.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Jonathan S. Cullick
Director, Writing Instruction Program
Department of Literature and Language
Northern Kentucky University
Highland Heights, KY 41099

Email: cullickj@nku.edu

Site maintained by: J. Cullick
Updated: 27-Jun-2005