At writing process's editing stage
Find & replace grammar traps

Every class has at least one and addict. Papers written by and addicts are often unwieldy muddles accented by grammar problems.

Teaching students to do computer editing using find-and-replace during the writing process can bring clarity to the writing muddles and eliminate many grammar problems.

What and addiction looks like

And addicts are students who string clauses together with and with all the zeal of a third-grader making popcorn chains. And addicts join whole lines of sentences with coordinating conjunctions, like this:

Coordinating conjunctions are fine, and they have their place, and they should be used sparingly, and they should not be used just to make a sentence longer, and even if Caitlin thinks writing longer sentences is the mark of a good writer and Caitlin wants to be a good writer, stringing yards of sentences together with coordinating conjunctions is not a good idea.

Why students ramble

Students write those long, rambling sentences for many reasons. Sometimes they think teachers want long sentences. (Teachers do sometimes give that impression.)

More often, though, the problem is that they are shirking the early stages of the writing process. Most and addicts simply do not plan what they want to say before they start to write. Planning won't get rid of all the long, rambling sentences, but it cut them down to a number that a typical student is willing to attempt to edit.

The solution to add addiction

And addicts who write on a computer can have the computer help them clear up the muddles and avoid the grammar problems. The computer won't embarrass or ridicule students, which makes computer aided editing especially attractive for struggling students.

The first thing students need to do is to pick out sentences that are long. Long sentences often ramble; they may also be ungrammatical.

Find zooms in on potential problems

There are three ways to identify long sentences that may need editing.

Writers could set their grammar checker to flag long sentences. My long sentence feature defines long sentence as 60 words. That is far too long for most students and most writing situations.

Writers could also use their computer's word count or readability tool to check individual sentence lengths. Those options have to be used one sentence at a time, which is way too time consuming for most students.

The best option is to use find-and-replace . I recommend this because it lets students focus on sentence units rather than sentence length. That means it can be used for treating many grammar problems besides and addiction. Once students know how to use the replace function, they will find many ways to use it throughout the writing process.

Rx for and addiction

Have and addicts use find-and-replace to change every and, but, and or in a can't-be-missed way. They could use colored type, highlighter, or replace the words with some silly alternative that would never appear in their writing.

In the section sentence shown below, I replaced and with @@@. Those three characters effectively separate one word group from another.

Now have students identify the right boundaries of independent clauses in the passage. Some of the word groups between the @@@ units are independent clauses, but not all of them are. I used a green hash sign (#) to mark the end of clauses that are capable of standing independently.

Now have students break the long sentence into shorter sentences.

Yes, I know there is another grammar problem showing up in the example. I'll show you how we handle that in a second.

Aim for variety in sentence lengths

Have students try putting each new, shorter sentence on its own line by hitting the enter key after a # or a period. Notice that setting each sentence on its own line reveals variations in sentence lengths.

Below I broke that original rambling sentence into four sentences of varying lengths. I worked from left to right through the original sentence.

Aside from the sentence boundaries, the only change to the original is changing the second and to the word but.

The beauty of working on a computer is students can return their original sentence back to paragraph format by just deleting the line breaks. The revision looks like this:

Coordinating conjunctions are fine. They have their place, but they should be used sparingly. They should not be used just to make a sentence longer. Even if Caitlin thinks writing longer sentences is the mark of a good writer and Caitlin wants to be a good writer, stringing yards of sentences together with coordinating conjunctions is not a good idea.

The revision is easier to read and sounds much better than the original, doesn't it? The revision sounds like it was written by a much smarter person.

Normally, you would not have students think about stylistic details like sentence variety until they are competent in the writing process. However, using find and replace, you can show students how just varying the lengths of sentences makes their writing appear more sophisticated.

Short sentences communicate best

Research shows that shorter sentences usually communicate better than long ones.

Does that mean students should never write long sentences? Of course not.

In general it is better to have more short sentences than long ones. Varying sentence lengths keeps writing with many short sentences from sounding babyish.