Teachers shouldn't correct punctuation, grammar, or spelling
errors in students' writing. Students should make their own corrections.
The trick to getting students to correct their own errors is
having writing objectives that incorporate a carefully
chosen list of specific punctuation errors and teaching
students to meet those objectives.
Unhelpful writing mechanics standards
What usually happens is that teachers phrase writing objectives
too broadly. For example, they will use phrasing such as
Students will observe the standards of
good English.
That would be fine as a goal
statement, but it is not an objective. Some other statements
that look more specific are not measurable either. For example,
Students will use correct punctuation
in their writing.
or even a narrower statement such as
Students will use commas correctly.
is too broad to be useful to either the teacher or the students.
If you ask, "Did the student use commas correctly?"
the answer might be, "Some rules were used correctly some
times."
Unless you specify which comma rules you want students to use
correctly, you can't count the number of times the student
applied the rule correctly and the number of times the student
didn't.
What's worse is that you can't tell Joshua to correct his work
to make sure he uses commas correctly because he won't know which
of the 187 million comma rules (Josh's estimate) to apply.
Helpful punctuation standards
On the other hand, if your goal is that
Students will put
a comma between the clauses of a compound sentence.
you make it possible for Josh to determine whether he did or
did not correctly place a comma within a compound sentence.
Define your standard of correctness
Define correct punctuation and each of your other standards of
writing mechanics in terms of
Let me give you an example of how the trick works.
Let's one of your annual goals is:
Students
capitalize the first word of each sentence.
When you see a word group between periods or other ending punctuation
in a student paper, you ask, "Did the student capitalize
the first word of this sentence?"
The answer is either yes or no.
You can count the number of times the student did capitalize
the first word of the sentence and the number of times the student
did not.
You don't have to do all this from scratch. Check
out my shortcut to writing objectives for writing mechanics in
measurable ways.
Benefits of narrow objectives
Phrasing your writing mechanics issues narrowly has several benefits.
If you define correctness on any writing mechanics issue using
this simple trick, you'll make grading papers easier for yourself.