ENGL 5010: Week Four/Tuesday Slide Deck

ENGL 5010
Week Four:
Responding To
Student Writing
Part 1

Lunsford and Lunsford 784
First, teachers vary widely in their thinking about what
constitutes a “markable” error. Second, teachers do not
mark as many errors as the popular stereotype might
have us believe, perhaps because of the difficulty of
explaining the error or because the teacher is focusing on
only a few errors at any one time. Finally, they concluded
that error patterns had indeed shifted.

Lunsford and Lunsford 785
Sloan also found that professional writers
were prone to making errors, though the
errors they made often differed
significantly from those of the first-year
writers.

Lunsford and Lunsford 788
—all so that we can tell you now that in
a random stratified sample of 877 (of
1,826 total) anonymous student
papers, we found 645 comma splices.

Lunsford and Lunsford 793
Together, the two shifts we have identified
suggest that student writers today are tackling
the kind of issues that require inquiry and
investigation as well as reflection and that
students are writing more than ever before.

Lunsford and Lunsford 796
But every blessing brings its own curse. In this
case, many of the wrong word errors appear to be
the result of spell-checker suggestions. A
student trying to spell “frantic,” for example,
apparently accepted the spell-checker’s
suggestion of “fanatic.” Wrong word for sure.

Lunsford and Lunsford 793
In any case, teachers spent a lot of
energy on correcting such errors,
marking half of all missing or incomplete
documentation mistakes, for example.

Lunsford and Lunsford 799
With the exception of a handful of funny and often
imaginative letters to aliens, all from the same class, as well
as some fiction, the papers we examined stuck resolutely
to what Weathers dubbed Grammar A: traditional usage,
organization, and style. We had imagined, given our field’s
lively and intense discussion of alternate styles in the last
decade, that we would see more evidence of such
experimentation in student writing today.

Lunsford and Lunsford 793
The rate of error in our study,
then, should also be seen as
rate of attention to error.

Williams 152
I am often puzzled by what we call errors of
grammar and usage, errors such as different than,
between you and I, a which for a that, and so on. I
am puzzled by what motive could underlie the
unusual ferocity which an irregardless or a
hopefully or a singular media can elicit.

Williams 153
When we do this, the matter of error turns less
on a handbook definition than on the reader’s
response, because it is that response—
“detestable,””horrible”—that defines the
seriousness of the error and its expected
amendment.

Williams 154
When we read for typos, letters constitute the field
of attention; content becomes virtually
inaccessible. When we read for content, semantic
structures constitute the field of attention; letters
—for the most part—recede from our
consciousness.

Williams 156
What I am interested in is the fact that no one, E. B.
White least of all, seemed to notice that E. B. White
had made an error. What I'm interested in here is the
noticing or the not noticing by the same person who
stipulates what should be noticed, and why anyone
would surely have noticed if White had written,
I knows me and him will often revisit it, …

Williams 158-59
The point is this: We can discuss error in two ways: we
can discuss it at a level of consciousness that places
that error at the very center of our consciousness. Or
we can talk about how we experience (or not) what
we popularly call errors of usage as they occur in the
ordinary course of our reading a text.

Williams 159
But if we could read those student essays
unreflexively, if we could make the
ordinary kind of contract with those texts
that we make with other kinds of texts,
then we could find many fewer errors.

Williams 163
M y n o t i c i n g a n y o f t h i s ,
h o w e v e r , i s e n t i r e l y
idiosyncratic.

Hartwell 105
Indeed, I would agree with Janet Emig
that the grammar issue is a prime example
of “magical thinking”: the assumption
that students will learn only what we
teach and only because we teach.

Hartwell 108
Thus we might suspect that the grammar
issue is itself embedded in larger models
of the transmission of literacy, part of
quite different assumptions about the
teaching of composition.

Hartwell 109
It is not surprising that we call each other
names: those of us who question the
value of teaching grammar are in fact
shaking the whole elaborate edifice of
traditional composition instruction.

Hartwell 119
It may simply be that as hyperliterate adults
we are conscious of “using rules” when we
are in fact doing something else, something
far more complex, accessing tacit
heuristics honed by print literacy itself.

Hartwell 127
It is, after all, a question of power […] At
no point in the English curriculum is the
question of power more blatantly posed
that in the issue of formal grammar
instruction.