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Since we cannot teach college-level writing students all of the nuances of basic grammar (for various reasons, not the least of which is time), I have focused on eight issues that recur in first- and second-year student writing. Learning to detect these in student writing can help a tutor to steer student writers towards tighter and more direct sentence constructions – ultimately resulting in clearer essays. These are eight issues that appear on my English 111 and 112 grading rubrics, with increasing point-value attached to each as the semester wears on. Many of the following examples come from Purdue University’s excellent Online Writing Lab (OWL): http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/grammar/. The OWL examples are in bright blue; the ones I have written are in the color of the font you are reading now. All of the examples show the incorrect sentence, followed by an explanation in parentheses. 1. Vague pronoun reference a. When a person comes to class, you should have your homework ready. (The pronoun does not agree in person.) b. Although the motorcycle hit the tree, it was not damaged. (Does “it” refer to the motorcycle or the tree?) 2. Comma splice a. We danced all night, we were very tired the next day. (Two complete sentences are fused with a comma. Either insert a coordinating conjunction or a semi-colon.) 3. Apostrophe use a. The worst incidence of a misused apostrophe I saw this year so far has been “go’s.” This is a misused apostrophe and a misspelling. The student meant the word “goes.” Here is a sentence with errant apostrophes: “At the store we bought egg’s and cracker’s.” Apostrophes generally mean possession/ownership, but never mean plurality. 4. Shift in verb tense a. The ocean contains rich minerals that washed down from rivers and streams. (In this instance, “contains” is in the present tense and “washed” is in the past tense.) 5. Sentence fragments a. I need to find a new roommate. Because the one I have now isn't working out too well. (The clause that begins with “because” needs to be joined to the previous sentence.) b. Toys of all kinds thrown everywhere. (No main verb.) 6. Subject/Verb agreement a. The box containing chocolates were beautiful. (The subject is “box,” not chocolates, so the verb must be singular.) b. Either the teacher or the students is to blame. (The “or” requires that the verb match the closer subject, so this should be “are to blame.”) 7. Frequently misused words (mostly homonyms) a. Its/it’s, their/there/they're, are/our, then/than, your/you're, weather/whether, were/where, to/two/too (words that are homonyms either share a spelling or a pronunciation, but have different meanings.) 8. Passive voice a. A song will be sung by the band at the dance. (The passive voice is here constituted by a form of the verb “to be” plus a past participle. Passive voice weakens sentence structure, but sometimes the passive voice does have a place in college writing, as in some science writing. In English 111 and 112, however, students should attempt to write in active voice: “The band will sing a song at the dance.”) This list by no means comprehensively covers the errors one would find in first- and second-year-student writing. Were we to construct such a list, it would be so overwhelming as to paralyze a tutor, or a grader. With a list of eight common flaws, we might alert students to recurring problems, and more importantly, problems students can fix. If students can identify these recurring errors in their own work, the overall clarity of their essays will improve, beginning on the sentence level and building to the level of overall strength of analysis and argument. “Local” (i.e. sentence-level) and “Global” (i.e. essay structure) issues are intimately intertwined, in fact codependent, in student writing. A tutor or grader should not focus entirely on either. But when focusing on student problems on the sentence-level, a tutor can benefit from the more manageable scope the above list provides so as to not be bogged down by the myriad – in fact innumerable – problems that do appear in students’ work. |