In addressing conventions of
grammar, punctuation or usage, distinguish between intermittent slips and
patterns of error (indicating a lack of command) in students´ texts. How you
respond to intermittent slips will likely depend on the stage of the draft and
what kind of instructions or expectations you´ve established.
Risk-taking and error are absolutely
essential to growth. If you identify a pattern or patterns of error, understand
that they represent an effort at something rhetorically or linguistically new
and difficult for the writer. This is not a careless or deficient writer but
someone who is pushing him/herself in his or her writing. (Bill Strong, in
"Coaching Writing Development," argues that good writing teachers
learn to read for what students are attempting to accomplish syntactically and
rhetorically.)
If a writer lacks command of a
particular grammatical convention, research on language learning suggests that
she is best poised to begin learning that convention: --when she is committed
to a text, a purpose for that text, and an audience for whom getting that
convention "right" really matters. --when she is at a stage, with
that project, that allows her to focus on how individual sentences are working
to achieve the larger goals she has for the text. --when the convention is
presented to her in words she can understand in the spirit of helping her
succeed in the goals of that text (Weaver).
If a student´s text suggests a lack
of command over several conventions of grammar, punctuation or usage, work on
one or two at a time. (You might prioritize which conventions to address on the
basis of which patterns have the biggest impact on the effectiveness of the
piece given the student´s purpose, or the student´s ability to develop the
piece. Some researchers have argued that you should address higher-status
conventions first. One set of studies found that professors were more likely to
downgrade a text on the basis of a wider number of errors than
business-executives−but that both were equally likely to identify as
"serious" errors such as the following: fragments, run-on sentences,
and mistakes with subject-verb agreement.)
Gaining command over a particular
convention requires repeated, meaningful and contextualized engagement with the
convention. Isolated drills (or ignoring the problem) won´t work.
