Give true English grammar help
Just red ink or corrections aren't helpful

Giving students English grammar help as you grade their writing can be dilemma. Mark too many errors and students think writing is too hard for them; mark too few and you allow them to think their grammar for writing is better than it is.

I'm going to show you a paragraph submitted by a student. Then I'll show you the same paragraph as I've marked it up and share the feedback I'd give to the student on the grammar aspect of the work early in a course.

The student's work

Indian's

Indian's are a important part in this world,the Aztec Indian's make potery,and they also sacrificed the lives of there tribe,the Indian's beileved in a certen God,they beileved that this God would not make the sun move till the tribe of Indian's got a tribe member,that was eather smart,or that was beileved to answer to the God's.The Indian's had to go to the top of the tribe's temple and alow the other Indian's to rip there heart out wile still beating and hold it to the sun,they nearly sacrificed over seven-hundred Indian's a day.

The same paragraph marked up

This sample is representative of much student work in that it contains a few errors repeated several times, plus a few that appear only once.

Words highlighted in yellow are errors a spelling checker would have caught. Words highlighted in blue are misspellings that spell-checking would not have marked. The bracketed numbers refer to an error on my master list for the class. The brackets are immediately after the error.

Determine error level at course start

I mark only errors on my master list to establish baseline performance. I ignore other errors entirely. In this case, I've ignored such things as the capitalization on gods and the presentation of numerals.

When I return the first papers, I have students record or graph their most frequent errors. Students must know their errors before they can use English grammar help in eliminating those errors.

In my experience, the number of errors you flag is less important than your attitude toward student errors. You can get away with flagging lots of errors if you give students some way they can reduce the number of errors in their next paper. Students want their English grammar help to work NOW, not on their first job after law school.

The error tally in the sample paper

Even though this student's paper looks like a mess of errors, aside from errors spell check would catch—the student had 7 of these in fewer than 100 words—the student has only four types of serious errors:

• [9] Misused possessive apostrophe (9 of these)

• [8] Comma splice (4 of these)

• [4] Wrong word (4 of these)

• [19] Misplaced or dangling modifier (1 of these)

Since the student is making a three errors repeatedly, English grammar help can be targeted to just those few errors. Mastery of just the rule for the possessive apostrophe will make make a huge difference in the student's work.

Sisyphus is not in your English class

Students who believe they cannot possibly succeed at reducing their writing mechanics error level will not even try.

You must make students believe in their own ability to correct and eliminate errors from their writing.

Most students have to have a teacher's help to reduce their grammar effort to levels they find acceptable before they can profit from a teacher's English grammar help.

(Students will want to do less work than what you'd like, but it's their writing. Live with it.)

Discuss error reduction with the class

After returning papers and making some general comments, I have students do some informal writing to get each individual student to think about ways to reduce errors.

I use one or two 1-2 minute informal writing topics such as:

• What the returned paper reveals is their most serious frequent error.

• The difference between a frequent error and a frequent serious error.

• What they think they could do in their next paper to reduce one of their most frequent errors.

• What kind of pattern of errors they think would be easiest errors to solve.

The point of the writing is to get each individual student to identify the fastest way reduce his/her serious errors with the least effort.

Students probably won't know that learning one basic concept will solve many grammar problems, but even Bob the Blockhead can probably figure out that learning to avoid an error he made 9 times in 100 words will be make a great improvement in his work.

Once you've gotten students to realize that reducing their grammar errors is doable, you have them at a point where they can profit from your English grammar help.

Students will be far quicker to pick up on your belief in their ability to deal with their grammar issues than they will be to grasp the grammatical rules for subject-verb agreement.

Most of my students will work on eliminating a set (usually 3 to 5 errors) of grammar or punctuation errors from my master list. Except in very short classes, each student's list is tailored to the individual student's most frequent errors. (The occasional student whose grammar is nearly flawless on the serious errors front, gets to select some other aspects of writing to work on.)

I teach students how to go about studying grammar, using the procedures I outline in Grammar Abusers Anonymous and leave them to do it. Occasionally I might spend 10 minutes discussing a grammar topic with the class, but normally I provide English grammar help personally as a last resort for students who have studied on their own and still cannot figure out why what they are doing is wrong.

One last thing: whenever possible, let the computer mark errors. Not only does that save you time, but it demonstrates to students how they can use their computers to find errors. Click for other tips about giving feedback.