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Stephen Karlson writes:
I expect juniors and seniors to have a basic understanding of the meanings and spellings of simple words.
An expectation, mind you, that is largely in vain. In my public opinion class last week, when talking about affect (in the public opinion context, a synonym for emotion), I ended up explaining the difference between the words affect and effect in common usage. I’m pretty sure this was the first time any of my students were made aware that these two words, in fact, are not the same.
Of course, it doesn’t help by the time students have reached me they generally have had 13–16 years of experience with teachers and professors in various fields whose reaction to shoddy grammar and usage can be summed up as “eh, it’s not my job to fix it,” rather than the proper response of whacking them over the head repeatedly with a copy of Strunk and White.
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6 comments:
We shall see. I returned a stack of problem sets and vented about “Allocative efficiency is when” constituting a form that their fourth grade teachers should have corrected. On the bluebooks, there was one person who began writing “is w” then crossed it out and wrote “means.”
I’m not sure what the secret is other than being consistently firm and pointing out why errors are errors.
Friendly observation that The Elements of Style is short enough that it would be an easy notch for the “50 book challenge.” (Heh.)
Indeed it would be. Actually, I just finished book #4 early in the morning on Wednesday, so expect a review soon.
Dumb typos and bad grammar make me fume as well, but to be fair, in a blue-book exam, where students are writing under a time limit (I assume) and where the focus should be on the quality of ideas, is it all that reasonable to expect near-perfect spelling and a great deal of attention to the nuances of the usages of grammar?
Well, on a blue-book exam (or the functional equivalent that Millsaps uses, the “college-ruled looseleaf” exam), I’m significantly more lenient, although the writing has to be at least comprehensible. But on take-home exams and papers (particularly the latter—we don’t just run a Writing Center for our own amusement), shoddy grammar and usage is a point-loss offense.
After spending two years teaching Honors writing, freshman comp and technical writing as a grad student at USM, I would say that I was more alarmed by those who thought “good writing” only meant “correct grammar.” It was hard to explain to some why they got a C or a D with no grammar errors, but many organization or logic or damn-right-boring-thesis errors. That’s all they had been judged by previously.