Well, if there are entire paragraphs that need to be cut or rewritten anyway, it’s a waste of time correcting the comma placement in those paragraphs. Major changes first, sentence-level stuff later.
There is a ‘correct’ use of email ‘professionally’? There’s all sorts of uses of email, all sorts of formats, some formal, some less so, many of which can be involved in a professional situation.
I did have to ask my boss to start using at least some capitals and/or punctuation marks in emails, explaining to him that he was triggering quite a few people’s spam filters :smack:
I’m with you on this one. It needs to be in a contrasting colour, otherwise it’s hard to succinctly indicate small points.
To be fair, the items on the list might be exclusive:
He likes pimpin’ bitches: he clips and combs bitches at the dog show and inadvertantly left out the r
He like hoes: he’s an amateur gardener
He likes women: he’d like you to know he’s straight-up straight
My friend’s daughter recently graduated from a “name” college (sister-school level) and her English teacher said he didn’t care if they had their papers edited by others, as long as they got their point across. I read one of her papers she wrote as a senior and it was so sad. Yet she graduated in good standing.
Sure, but if I can consistently see what I’m getting wrong now, I ought learn from that information and make fewer mistakes in subsequent drafts. You won’t learn if no one tells you, and if you write three or four drafts misusing punctuation, then just tidy it all up at the very end, what’s going to stick? My guess is the usage that happened three or four times, and not the teacher-corrected things you were told were “petty” and not worth getting right the first time.
Because if you spend a lot of time on punctuation and grammar first on a part of your text that you are either going to throw out, or rearrange significantly, then you’re wasting your time, obviously. Also, if the ideas are so garbled that the person giving feedback doesn’t understand what you’re trying to say, that person can’t really know what the correct grammar and punctuation should be. Grammar is not driven only at the clause or sentence level–it’s drive at the extended discourse level.
I never said that I did. I devote a whole draft for that.
It’s not a problem. Believe me, I’ve tried both ways. If you correct only the grammar and punctuation, students think that’s all there is to academic writing.
I agree if you’re correcting only a few things, but when a paper is seriously flawed in many ways, and it comes back bleeding in red ink it just screams, “You’re completely hopeless.” It can be overwhelming, and can discourage struggling writers. If you make a notation in the margin, it’s pretty easy to find.
I had a Spanish professor turn back compositions with nothing but the missing diacritics written in. (We didn’t use spell check, and could have, if that’s all I wanted to learn.) It didn’t help much.
I disagree that reviewing grammar and punctuation is ever a waste of time in a writing class.
Who’s suggesting you only correct grammar and punctuation?
Not on a paper “seriously flawed in many ways”. If you have that many notations in the margin, your student is going to have a hell of a time deciphering all the notations. And what’s more clear and concise: “don’t” or writing a whole note in the margin to describe the problem and how to fix it? What uses less of your time?
I thought that was the implication.
Of course you have to teach grammar.
There was a study they did with two classes of college freshman writing students. In one class, the professor corrected only grammar, and in the other the professor only gave feedback on content and organization. At the end of the term, a group of instructors (unaware of which were which) compared each student’s writing from the beginning of the term and the end. They found almost no difference in improvement. In fact, some students in the second group had better grammar. Granted, that’s just one study.
The question is how much grammar to teach, and when, and with ESL students, which grammar points they’re ready to handle. I’ve done a whole hour lesson on a grammar point, like fragments or something, and half the students will continue to write them.
Exactly.
That’s my point. You don’t even need to write “don’t,” if you can be sure that the student knows what your taking about. If you write “don’t write fragments” and the student doesn’t understand, then there’s no point. Moreover, if you write something like, “don’t use the passive here,” the student needs to know why.
But useless comments like “vague,” or “unclear,” are not very helpful, no matter what color you write them in. It’s better to ask a question, such as, “What’s the connection between [point A] and [point B]? Explain that here.”
You obviously have never had to give feed back on the three-draft compositions of 40 inexperienced writing students (especially ESL) in a term with five assignments. It’s impossible to correct absolutely everything, every time, and often not it’s very effective.
I think the point was the student wrote the word “dont” which the professor corrected to “don’t”.
The problem with tutoring is that it only works if you REALLY want the help. Unfortunately for all concerned. (I was an ESL tutor for a while, and the students that I got were not interested in more than token efforts or trying to get me to do their work for them, unfortunately. 
)
I’ve also heard students complain that “the tutor didn’t catch all the mistakes and fix them.” Sigh. It’s actually the student’s ultimate responsibility to make repairs to their own papers.
On the issue of how much to correct a piece of writing that is not only poorly organized, but has many grammatical, spelling and punctuation errors, the teacher is not well advised to indicate ALL the corrections at once. You have to decide which lesson you want to teach first. If a student gets back a paper that is filled from start to finish with red marks, it is just too much to address. Most students will just say “To hell with it,” and resign themselves to failure.
The teacher should decide which error or set of errors is doing the most harm and teach the writer how to fix that. Ideally, you’d have the time to go on to the next set of errors on the next composition. Ideally, you’d find something good to say as well. In reality, you never have enough time to do so. When I taught English – to native English speakers – I had five classes a day. Each one had at least 25 students; one had over 30. If each student wrote 2 pages, that’s a minimum of 250 pages to read and evaluate. It’s an impossible job to do perfectly, and the best you can hope for is that there will be some improvement with many of the students.
An observation, if I may.
My father is in his mid-50s, as are his coworkers, and they’re electronics engineers. Written communication in their field is meant to be communicative first and pretty second. I’ve seen his memos, and some written by others in his department, and while there are a few people who obviously write a lot and a few people who are obviously massively dyslexic or have other difficulties, most of them are just sort of placidly mediocre. They miss some commas or mix up there/their/they’re, but you don’t have to locate a translator for Old Lower Martian in order to make sense of the message.
I’m also a university student, in a field that requires a lot of reading and writing skills, because scribbling down your opinions and getting them published is a major part of the work. I’m pretty good with grammar and spelling, so I’m often asked to edit papers. There is no middle ground in my age bracket. I’m either dotting i’s and crossing t’s in a paper that’s professional quality already, or near it, or I am looking at the results of two drunken rats tussling on a computer keyboard which has been saved to a flashdrive and printed in 12-point MS Comic Sans.
Furthermore, if papers in English by native English speakers make you cry, for Og’s sake don’t ever offer to edit papers for foreign-language classes. The meanest thing I’ve ever done to the beginning French/Spanish/German students was translate exactly what they wrote. There was one kid in the high school Spanish class below mine who consistently spelled “llaves” (“keys”) as “llevas” (“you wash”). That was a much different essay than he intended, I’m sure.
With all due respect (to your Dad and to you), I submit that you do need a translator. As a former technical writer, I fulfilled that role as necessary.
While I have no problem with “Written communication in their field is meant to be communicative first and pretty second,” I have to say that engineers’ communication must be communicative to a certain group. The written material that goes to other engineers must necessarily be different than that which goes to end users. It was my job to make sure that end users had easy-to-follow instructions, that were as clear and concise and free of technical jargon as possible. It was also my job to make sure that engineering documents (technical and functional specs, maintenance manuals, etc.) were just as the engineers themselves wanted them. Communication was key; the writing that was necessary to communicate to the end reader was the trick. “Prettiness” had little to do with it, outside of (in all cases) adhering to house style and proofreading for proper grammar and punctuation.
When communicating with professors or the university administration, there is (in my opinion), no excuse for a university student to write in anything but an acceptable, grammatically-correct, style that lacks popular abbreviations. When I began university in 1979, an English Language Proficiency test was required; anybody who used anything but proper grammatical English was still admitted to the University but required to attend remedial courses. I believe the requirement was dropped at some point in the 80s; apparently, too many parents and students complained. :rolleyes: That should answer the OP’s question right there.
Maybe I’m old-fashioned, but when I taught technical writing at a college, I expected to see full and complete sentences, properly punctuated. I did not want to see any jargon (unless the exercise required it), in-house terms, job-specific acronyms or initializations, slang, or anthing else that required an insider’s knowledge. I made sure my students could write to any technical audience, end user or developer, before they could pass my course. Students who complained about “too many red marks” on their paper were instructed on how they could gain fewer red marks. Hell, I had one student call me “Moses.” When I asked why, I was told, “Because you’re the only one who could part this red sea of comments and markup.”
Perhaps surprisingly to some (though neither to myself or my colleagues), the students who got the most red marks and took the time to ask about them and to correct their errors, got the best jobs. The ones who called me various names and never bothered to ask about their errors didn’t. 'Nuff said for now.
It’s not a style. In my English Teaching courses we were taught 4 methods for teaching writing, and that approach was part of three of them! I thought it was idiotic too. First kids don’t pay attention to the corrections in a final product, so they’re not learning anything then so waiting until the end (or nearly) is way too late into the process. And second, draft after draft strikes me as a waste of time - how much do most people actually improve between drafts 2 and 3, or 3 and 4?
How did you respond to this e-mail? I probably sound like one of those “well, if *I *had kids this is how I would raise them” people, but I think my standard response to correspondence so poorly written would have to be: “You are in college, and expected to write in standard, reasonably correct English. Please rephrase your question in a way that makes sense, and I’ll be happy to answer it.” You know, something like that.
But I’m sure with that I’d run into the problems mentioned in post 45, so there’s that trade-off.
Everyone here is making the assumption that these kids don’t know standard English. That may be true for some of them, but I think at least for a certain percentage it’s just laziness. For evidence, I point you to this thread.
The first post by our guest, bigstinger was as follows (in its entirety):
Reading this one might think that this guy doesn’t know how to put a basic sentence together. But he’s chastised (quite mildly) by Samclem:
And bigstinger actually changes the way he writes! (Really, I was shocked.)
Now, is this a shining example of perfect grammar? Not so much. But legible and amusing? Yes, I think so.
So, my point is that many people seem to think this sort of writing is just fine. When it’s pointed out to them that it isn’t fine, they might “remember” how to write with some legibility.
My father was a technical writer and editor for IBM for many years and it frightens me that cost-cutting has meant that developers are writing the materials now instead. No offense to Dopers who can do both, but yikes.
Sorry; I wasn’t very clear on that. What I meant by ‘no translator needed’ was that the engineers were able to write clearly to one another. None of them had spelling or grammar so atrocious that they had to call in other engineers to figure out what on Earth their co-worker was trying to put across. I am by no means trying to say that engineers can talk to Earthlings; if they could, you’d have a different career. 
With college students, on the other hand, the writing is frequently so bad that I can’t tell what they’re trying to say, even if it’s a short paper on a topic that was covered in the class we share. The papers I edit are either very, very good, or so terrible that even people who share the same academic background can’t make heads or tails of the mess.
An interesting look at writing skills in the past can be had by reading the papers and letters of the Wright Brothers. Neither had a high school degree (though both completed the requirements for one). Neither had any pretention to real literary merit.
But their clarity of expression is striking. Much of what they wrote is a pleasure to read and a model of succinct and effective communication. IMO, they would easily rank in the top few percent among college students today.
Well, look at the letters and speeches of Abraham Lincoln, whose formal education consisted of about 18 months of schooling. For example, his first public speech, which he wrote when he was 23.