“my presasive essay will be on salvery. slavery is bad because noone should own an other person. every person on earth has there basic rights tooken away by slavery. thats y salvery should b illegel everywhere.”
That is how most of the students in my school (and, for arguments sake, I’ll be more specific and say in the class of 2008) write. Not only do they misspell a good portion of the words that they use, but they have no clue how to “spice up” their writing by using different adjectives.
I once spell-checked a paper where the author either did not know how to or would not spell “because” correctly. Said person would move between “becus”, “beacuse”, “cuz”, “becuz”… But never once use the word “because”. It’s not like this was an informal letter to the teacher - this was a persuasive essay, written in the tenth grade, for the most challenging teacher my peers would ever see while in public education.
There’s a reason for that, at least in my district. Weekly spelling tests go all the way through elementary school (which ends at the fifth grade, for us), are then dropped off in the sixth and seventh, and brought back in the eighth. Once the students are in high school, spelling tests are given at the discretion of the teacher. Tenth grade is where the grammatical instruction stops, and the district believes that the students should know all there is to know by the end of sophomore year.
So why do I still run into Advanced Placement students who write just like the opening statement? Why is it so difficult to have extra grammar courses? Why can’t students be forced to complete those extra courses? We look like laughingstocks! In regards to the state tests, more students were forced to retake them because of English scores than math!
It annoys me that we’re being given a second-class education in English. It is, to a good portion of my school’s population, the first language the kids were taught… However, still eluding a good chunk of the student body is the ability to form a complex sentence, or the ability to use a thesaurus!
Why?
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I heard that, girlfriend! Hallelujah!
It pains me. I know that some people just can't spell, but that's why we have spell check!
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/ediblewoman
One of my English teachers was a huge supporter of descriptive writing. We were graded on our use of adjectives, adverbs, and "showing, not telling." To help ensure our essays were as expressive as they could be, we were forbidden to use the word "there."
It actually really helps your imagery when you don't use that word. Trust me, it's not an easy habit to get in to, but once you do, you'll be making an effort not to use it ever again. That class was back in 1998 and I still only use that word every so often. :-)
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Some mistakes can't be undone/ it'll never be like it was/ and wishing for it only makes it worse
Rocky Votolato
She teaches "Tell, Show, Mean" as a way of constructing everything from a sentence to a paragraph to an essay to a novel. It's also a great way to think about using quotes in an essay. Tell what the person said, show how it applies to your thesis through and example, and explain what it means to your thesis. Solid.
http://www.progressiveu.org/blog/ediblewoman
I've also had teachers set similar limitations, such as banning certain words from our writing. I'm so glad she did! Such challenges have helped make me the writer I am today (whether that's good or bad)!
I helped grade some papers for my aunt, who teaches seniors in high school. I was shocked to see how bad the spelling and grammatical errors were. What's even worse is that about 70% of the students plagiarized their work. These are seniors in high school and they could not even write one-paged summaries! After all of the time and effort it took me to Google each summary, I can see why so many teachers do not bother to double check their students' work against the things published on the internet, but it is sad to see that so many of them didn't even care enough to TRY. For a one-page summary, I don't see how much extra effort it would be to write their own, original work than it took to cut and paste.