“Errors”
Is anyone into “Errors” yet? It seems like a hybrid book to me–some pedagogy but mostly a rather intricate style manual, which I wouldn’t have perceived as readily without last fall’s style class (thank you Tina and Bradley!).
The idea of helping students/tutees overcome fear of errors in their writing in favor of focusing on content is most helpful when working with adult college students who haven’t sat in a grammar class for years.
That’s my initial reaction to “Errors.” What do you think about this book?
June 3rd, 2008 12:57
I just got my copy back from a borrowing today, so I haven’t re-read it yet, just paged through it a bit. I forgot how much the book focused on non-traditional students. Certainly, that’s a big part of the demographic at Western, though I’m not sure how many nontrads fit the “basic” label.
June 3rd, 2008 14:30
Oh, you’d be surprised how many “basic” students hit the writing center–not from the English program but from counseling, management, business, etc.
I just perused the chapter on vocabulary in which the author discusses three levels of writing–basic, intermediate, and advanced (I think she called it), which really nails students’ basic writing problems, from my perspective. Expertise in vocabulary use spills over into every aspect of writing, so I plan to read that chapter again.
I was wondering (all you English teachers), if you have expectations by which you judge and assign grades to all writing projects in your classes or if you try to consider each student’s work separately and establish expectations by which you assign grades according to students’ individual progress. I’m trying to learn how to set realistic expectations for students that recognize their limitations rather than overwhelm them with what could turn into a complete re-write and thus discourage them from returning to the writing center.
June 4th, 2008 09:36
Great questions, Nan. For me, there’s a need for some level of universal standards, but applying one yardstick to all students shortchanges everyone. In contrast, a more flexible standard allows higher expectations for students who are already good writers but accommodates those who need help for whatever reason. For example, this past Spring I taught FYC. Students ranged from a 25-year old ex-Marine who had written a lot as part of his job in the USMC, a 45-year old former manager back in school after being downsized, a 20-year old computer science major from the Sudan who had been speaking English less than a year. Not to mention all the “regular” students from Chicago and downstate high schools. Interestingly, the complete rewrite was one of the tools applied to everyone, with varied goals. For students with a pretty good grasp of the essay, I’d push them to embrace less traditional writing forms (imagine a piece which would fit in Salon instead of the Courier). For students who weren’t up to speed, I focused on their shortcomings. But few folks were what I’d classify as “basic” writers. The most common problems were more mundane: coming to class and doing the work.
June 8th, 2008 20:15
I tried something new this year with the high school freshmen, which was to require a student write and rewrite and rewrite until he/she met standards for that level. Some students took literally nine drafts. I did not assign a grade until the standards were met, and at that point, the student received an A.
I was highly in favor of this approach from the beginning, for I recognize how little students regard my comments on a final draft. They look at the grade and throw the paper away, especially at the freshman level. The rewriting required they address the comments. It was a LOT of work to comment on so many drafts, especially since I had 100 freshmen (and then 26 College Writing students on top of that).
They hated it, and I fondly remember one student storm up to me after she received her paper back with “rewrite” stamped on it, screaming “Just give me an F! I don’t want to do this!” Allowing missing work was against our philosophy, so this student was being harassed to some degree until she completed the assignment. However, after my end-of-the-year evaluation, my original opinions were confirmed. They stated that the process was “annoying” and “stupid” but that they really did learn from it. Now the question is whether I can keep that kind of revising stamina for years to come . . .
June 9th, 2008 08:58
Katherine, I really like your approach of holding students’ feet to the fire until they produce an acceptable product that represents their best effort. It’s human nature–and years of conditioning–to write only for a teacher in order to get a grade. In high school, students just aren’t mature enough to connect the process with success later on; in college, students are often so swamped with other classes and life outside of school that they, too, just write to “get by” with a grade. I’m guilty of that; I often think after I’ve completed a project that I’ll go back and research the subject more and write further. So far, I have never had time.
I also like the oral approach to peer comments. Usually, verbal comments are positive, so if nothing else, they serve to encourage student writers to keep trying. In tutoring, a good part of my effort is to be a cheerleader–especially for ESL students and those with limited writing ability. In the 50 minutes I generally work with them, it is impossible to “correct” (as if I know everything!!) all the problems in an assignment, but at least I can make the editing experience pleasant so they schedule future sessions…when we’ll work on exactly the same problems ad nauseum. I like Shaughnesy’s statement that even the most accomplished writers can’t say that they have finished LEARNING to write. Maybe that’s why you, Katie, Bradley, and I aren’t accountants–we like interacting in a fluid environment with inexact boundaries. Who’s to say ultimately what’s right or what’s wrong–except, of course, about the basics of spelling, vocabulary, sentence structure, etc. Have you read “Angela’s Ashes”? What a powerful, best-selling book, but when I read it years ago, I was so hung up on punctuation and convention that I couldn’t enjoy it.
By the way, I’m glad there are high school teachers like you who put in so much time to help students recognize their potential.
June 10th, 2008 11:02
Yeah, Katherine, it’s a shocking amount of work. Folks usually don’t have time to do that. We have teachers here who teach 4 sections of 22 students each. With 88 students, every 10 minutes per paper spent grading is 15 hours. So there’s a limit to what they can do. Some folks make the rewrites optional. I’ve done contract grading in the past. As you know, I’ve also done audio comments. That saves some time, and those minutes add up.
@Nan, by “oral approach” do you mean tutoring-style working with someone f2f, workshopping a revision?
June 10th, 2008 11:26
By “oral approach,” I was thinking of Katherine’s comment (in a response to another discussion) about allowing her students to respond verbally to each other’s work instead of peer editing in writing. Written peer responses can be a little more brutal than the face-to-face variety. Since tutoring is always a verbal exchange, it definitely requires a gentle approach–although we have one highly qualified tutor in the Quad Cities WC who is notorious for her heavy-handed technique. She says, “I’m here to educate…not graduate” students.
I have been amazed at the amount of time my instructors obviously invest in “correcting” and evaluating student work. Bradley, you and Prof. Malachuk have pointed out aspects of my projects that I didn’t even see myself when I was writing them. That’s why your requirement to turn in a draft is so helpful. Obviously, you could save yourself time by just grading a completed assignment, but you squeeze so much more value out of a piece by asking a student to edit and re-edit. Katherine, if you’re already doing this on the high school level, you’re helping your students prepare for college-level work.
June 10th, 2008 12:57
Very good. Writing also takes a million years. But it often produces better results–Ken Bruffee has written about that, as have others. And it’s easier to measure the success of peer critique when a copy is readily available.
Your heavy-handed tutor needs some help. High expectations, which I’m 100% in favor of, don’t mean politesse goes out the window. Quite the reverse; you can be more demanding if you smile while you say, “It’s time for a rewrite!”
June 18th, 2008 20:25
My initial reactions to Errors . . .
I was a bit taken aback to see it was written in 1977, for certainly writing contexts and pedagogy have changed dramatically since then.
At first glance, I considered Chapter 2 on handwriting to be irrelevant in 2008, for no teacher I know of assesses work based on handwriting. However, once I actually read the chapter, I understood the point and actually saw in my own students the limiting laborious task of simply producing hand-written text. I wonder how the fear of handwriting itself has lessened or increased as more and more students become accustomed to typing. I would think the fear of writing would decrease as students type, as they would assume their typing can be read. At the same time, if they rarely write by hand, the fear might increase.
Shaughnessy claims the average basic writer might write only 350 words per semester (14)! This is incredible, and I would doubt this statistic remains so low today.
Puctuation myths and misunderstandings–students really only use the period, comma, and capital letters. I would certainly agree, but as I look at the example sentences written by college students, my reaction is that these students don’t read. I teach low students in a low-income school, students who are at third and fourth grade reading levels as freshmen, but they still aren’t writing in this way. Are these really college freshmen? I’m new on the scene, so someone needs to shed some light here. Has something changed since 1977, or are there still students writing in this way? Is Shaughnessy focusing on a tiny fraction of students or are her examples more wide-spread? I guess I feel comparatively pretty lucky my students have the skills they do possess. Still not ACT-ready, but that’s another story.
June 18th, 2008 20:28
PS–Today we saw turtles, loons, herons, frogs, deer, a fox, and a squirrel. Matt also saw a beaver while kayaking . . . Can’t believe we’ve seen all that wildlife with my loud and wild children around!
June 19th, 2008 10:29
Katherine, interesting stuff, especially in light of what Katie told me yesterday about Moline HS and punctuation. I think the book has aged pretty well; certainly you could look in a citation index or do some searching to see if there’s scholarship which takes on that question directly. Another way to think about it: shift the ground slightly. For example, if Shaughnessy points out that trouble with handwriting can slow or stop writing progress, might the same be true of keyboarding? Or does the comparative ease of producing a final essay now (pressing “Print” vs. hours spent laboriously recopying and trying not to make a mistake–O how I hated the formal essays I was required to write) enable students to focus on other things?
Lunsford and Connors, and now Lunsford and Lunsford, have done two studies of error isolating the twenty most common errors. Commas dominated the list the first time; the second study with a new list is coming out soon. Here are the citations:
Lunsford, Andrea A. & Robert Connors. “Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma and Pa Kettle Do Research.” CCC 39 (1988): 395-409.
Lunsford, Andrea A. & Karen J. Lunsford. “‘Mistakes are a fact of life’: A national comparative study.” CCC 59.4 (June 2008, forthcoming).
In 1977 and now, the assumption for most is that any problems indicate a stupid or lazy writer. That’s one of the things Mina tried to debunk, though oen need only to turn to popular culture to see that. More importantly, different problems have different causes. Why is a student goofing up commas and semicolons? Poor knowledge? Bad teaching? Misguided attempts to impress? Anecdote: I once had a Korean student who absolutely battled sentence construction. After our third or fourth meeting on an essay, she said my advice was conflicting with the grammar checker in MS Word. I showed her how to turn that off, and we moved on to other things. For me, Shaughnessy shows that we have to think in that way all the time: complex inputs and outputs. That’s very difficult, and frankly most folks would rather count errors, flunk students, and move on.
June 19th, 2008 10:30
Also, very cool that you are seeing neat critters. I was wondering if the flooding had effected you at all–I remember that recent story of the lake bursting in central Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin river sure looked high when we drove past it a month or so ago.
June 28th, 2008 12:41
Finally getting into the talk on errors. I have the benefit of teaching both seniors heading to college and lower level sophomores struggling with self-expression. In response to Nan’s question, again I find the use of rubrics to be a clear guide in setting expectations with the students. I do not emphasize the use of sophisticated vocabulary or extensively complex sentence constructions as a measure of good writing at this stage. I want the students to focus on making their points clear and supporting them well. Shaughnessy quotes W.H. Auden in saying, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” This rings true at both levels for the students have to learn to step away from the one draft/final draft mentality. I can therefore individualize my assessments by focusing on clarity and support given the ability of the writer. I have seen students confused by what constitutes an “A” in my classroom, and therefore often share the common successes of the various styles via overheads and discussion forums. My typical question is “Why does this work?” Once the students can identify how well a piece works, they are less intimidated by the need to impress me or to sound overly-sophisticated.
My lower level students are more of a challenge because they have for the most part given up. They have succumbed to the labels and often refer to themselves as “retarded.” What they lack is the practice and the confidence. We also face the void between spoken and written communication, as Shaughnessy discusses. They want to simply get the ideas as close to right as quickly as they can. Re-scanning or revision is not seen as a necessary step in communicating clearly. Quite often these students respond, “You know what I mean so what is the big deal?” I know Katherine did alot of work trying to reprogram the mindset of the freshmen this year on what was “good enough.” Again, this is an attitude that needs to be addressed across the curriculum in order to emphasize the value of a polished response. These students avoid writing not because they don’t have anything to say, but because they are so afraid of reinforcing the perception of ignorance.
I agree with Katherine that probably most of my students compose at the computer. Because the work looks so neat contributes to the students’ view of first draft/final draft. Spellcheck will take care of correctness, so what more is to be done? On the one hand, word processing has made editing much easier for the students. Reading the draft, reorganizing the work, and deleting wordiness is easier to do on a computer than it was on a typewriter. Students just need to be reprogrammed by having several deadlines and actively participating in revision sessions. I alternate between teacher/student conferencing, student/student conferencing, small group read-alouds, and large group overhead analysis. I plan to be much stronger on requiring special “help” sessions in order to promote the best effort and maximize learning opportunities along the way. Katherine is right in that, once the final grade has been made, students are typically “done.” My policy in CW is that no grade is “final” until the student chooses—meaning all of my papers (with the exception of the research paper) have the option to be rewritten as often as the student is willing to work.
At the beginning of my CW class, I do include an examination of professional authors’ writing processes. I show the students the series of drafts and the amount of work each author expends before the final draft emerges. I think this helps to establish the amount of time I expect the students to put into each paper I assign.
As for the punctuation and capitalization errors Shaughnessy notes, I see these every day in my English classes, especially the lower level. They equate capitals with importance or emphasis–much like using all caps for emphasis (shouting) in emails or texting. They are mimicking the verbal qualities in their written work. Peer collaboration works well for identifying and correcting these errors, because what is emphasis for one is not necessarily so for another.
Final note: In my lower level classes, we read aloud alot. One of my sophomores this last semester refused to recognize any sort of punctuation and would read entire paragraphs without stopping. After the initial wow!, we discussed the importance of punctuation in supplying meaning and associations within the paragraphs. I started using DOL paragraphs without any punctuation for the students to revise. The results were various, but seemed to bring home the point that punctuation is important in deriving meaning from both the reader’s and writer’s perspectives.
June 29th, 2008 11:40
I’ve got to find my copy of E&E so I can respond to this!
June 29th, 2008 14:36
Reading more in E&E, I think spelling is a subject most teachers like to avoid. With word processing and the ever-increasing reliability (?) of word/spell-checking software, I just don’t see spelling as great a focus as it was previously. I think text messaging also factors into teachers accepting misspellings in the hand-written responses. With my lower levels, spelling is a creative craft and I have developed an ability to decipher most of what my kids write. Initially, it was a foreign language (much like their texting), but I saw my ESL kids making the same mistakes as my native-born speakers. Lots of rules and exceptions to the rules makes for difficult spelling. My response has been–read, read, read.
I laughed as I read about the vocabulary development chapter. Most of the sophomores and juniors are exposed to the most common prefixes, suffixes, and roots in their vocabulary preparations for the ACT. They retain the information for the quizzes, but I see very little application in their writing.
They are more willing to try and define an unknown word, but their vocabulary shows little development as such because they don’t use the words in either speech or writing.
I have banned the word “thing” from my CW class, however. I did have a prog in college (2nd time around) who banned the word “that.” (I think that was over the top.) I make students choose a more specific word that doesn’t distract from their point. In other exercises, when I have marked “WC” in a composition, I am telling the students there is a better word choice available. The students have to look up alternatives, using a thesarus either in hand or online, and decide on a clearer, more accurate choice. I hope they are expanding their vocabulary in this fashion and developing a greater sensitivity to words, as Shaunessy states.
The chapter on “Beyond the Sentence” hits home on many points. The difficulty with student writing is not that they don’t have ideas, but in general, they don’t extend themselves through elaboration and a variety of support. Shaughnessy writes of “staying with each thought..long enough to mark it as important.” My lower level kids sum up most of what they have to say in one or two lines. Structuring an 8-sentence paragraph is like pulling teeth, let alone striving for a multiple paragraph essay. They struggle with remembering the purpose of their writing, a trait not reserved only for the lower levels.
In my CW class, my students revisit their introductions and theses with the development of each paragraph. They need to refresh their purpose in order to keep their focus. As an exercise in focus and connection, I took a single-topic assignment and divided the intro paragraphs from body paragraphs and mixed them up. The students had to try and reassemble the intros with the bodys. Some matched up stylistically and others through organization. A few were difficult to match because they lacked focus, organization, and any unique style. I think the exercise was somewhat successful in defining the reader’s needs.
The thought patterns Shaughnessy goes on to present are familiar writingn assignments for my CW class. We cover different purposes and formats for a variety of papers. Next year, our class composition will differ significantly because of the addition of a dual-credit option for seniors. Most of my current A/B students have opted for the college credit writing class rather than the high school credit College Writing. Those who will qualify for CW will be those who did not qualify for Advanced Composition. I wonder how the loss of these more motivated students will affect the pool of writing talents in my class. I foresee more fundamental needs and probably fewer overall papers assigned. Change is good, but I can see that conferencing more frequently to really understand my students’ needs is going to be more important than ever.
July 5th, 2008 15:17
Spelling: I agree with Katie in that most teachers, at the high school level at least, don’t focus too much on spelling. I can only speak for myself, but I feel I 1) don’t know enough rules to teach spelling, 2) figure students should know it by now (guilty as charged by Shaughnessy), and 3) figure there are bigger fish to fry at this level, especially with the use of spell check. I DO teach commonly confused words, such as their/there/they’re etc., but I’ve found that students understand the differences, do well on isolated exercises and quizzes, and then continue to make the mistakes in their writing. Thus, this to me is a proofreading/motivational issue more than a lack of understanding.
I am certainly guilty of circling the word and writing “sp” in the margin, but I also try not to mark too many seemingly insignificant mistakes on essays b/c I don’t want students to feel overwhelmed. I understand Shaughnessy’s point that students want to spell correctly and only need to be empowered with the tools, and I do feel her approach with spelling error logs would be useful, but with 150 students, I don’t exactly feel it’s a top priority for how I spend my time. That’s how many feel, I’m sure, which is why students spell like they do. I used to have students complete error logs, so this is not a completely new concept, and I honestly don’t know how or why I got away from them. I think it was because my freshmen just didn’t have enough basic understanding about grammar to actually know why the errors were truly errors (and thus what to do about fixing them). There’s certainly a lot of directions a teacher can be pulled in, and I do feel guilty that I can’t do it all, but I also am realistic about my own limitations.
My response with spelling, like Katie’s, is READ! I had a student last year who spelled the word humans as “humands” — spoken language prevails! Based on this one word alone, I could tell she was not a reader (and I was right). Yet, one of my most avid readers in my honors class was a TERRIBLE speller, to the point that I thought he might have a reading disability, but he excelled in ALL other areas. I couldn’t figure it out, nor did I feel I have the expertise to try.