FAQs and Resources

First and most obviously, you should expect to write a lot.  In most WAC courses, this may probably means writing both formally for assessment by your instructor and writing informally as part of your own learning process.  Second, you should expect to have your work read and responded to by your instructor in a way that helps you improve either the paper you're working on or future papers, as well as to be challenged by your assignments.  Third, those assignments should invite you to think hard about key concepts in the course and to practice using language and genres important to the discipline or to its practice in the field.

So in short, you should expect to write in ways that will help you both grow intellectually and understand what it means to write as a member of a discipline - an art historian, sociologist, or literary critic - and your professor's responses to your work should be an important part of this process.

Don't be surprised if your WAC courses also require you to do some other things - perhaps to participate in peer workshops, to spend some time in class analyzing models of good writing in the field, to meet with your professor to talk about your work outside of class, to do lots of careful, thoughtful revision, to contribute to some collaborative document like a course wiki, or to pay more attention to the fit and finish of your work than you may do in other courses.  Your professor will be thinking about the best way to build writing into your course, and this may mean a range of activities and expectations.  Be ready for this.

General first-year writing courses like ENG 102 - the "composition" courses everyone's required to take when they get to college - are intended to lay a good foundation for the kind of writing you do as a college student.  They introduce general concepts and practices - like revision, citation, and genre, for example.

But study after study shows that real development as a writer depends most on repeated practice.  Writers learn to write by writing - and then by writing again, after getting feedback from informed and interested readers.  And there's lots about the specific sort of writing you'll do in school - and later, in your professional life -- that ENG 102 really can't teach you.  It can give you some important strategies for organizing texts, for example, but it can't tell you the specific patterns which the people who do what you've come here to learn to do - whether it's chemistry, psychology, or communications - actually practice as writers.

The Writing Across the Curriculum Program at Oswego takes this idea very seriously.   It requires that students have multiple opportunities to practice writing, reinforcing and building on the foundation laid in ENG 102 as they complete their majors.  This should also give you an opportunity to learn more deeply, become familiar with the language practices specific to your discipline, and recognize the importance of writing in the field you're aspiring to be a part of.  

Yes.  Good writing skills are perennially among the most important qualities employers look for from college graduates.  Lots of people who aren't "professional writers" still find themselves writing as an essential part of their daily worklives:  accountants write analyses of companies or investments, biologists write lab reports, newscasters write copy, etc., etc.  And even if some people find themselves in professional niches that don't require much daily writing, their advancement beyond that niche is often dependent on their ability to write with clarity, insight, and polish.  The 2004 report of the National Commission on Writing, sponsored by the College Board, estimates that US employers spend $3.1 billion each year on developing employees' writing skills, and most employers, it finds, give consideration to writing skills in both hiring and promotion decisions for salaried employees.

Beyond the professional reasons to develop your writing skills, however, we suggest that there are equally good intellectual ones, too:  writing well is a profoundly important part of thinking well.  Written language is how people name and sort out their ideas.  So the skills you develop as a writer are the cornerstone of a larger intellectual life.  If you've come to college for an education, you can't really get one without being able to write effectively.

Faculty sometimes express dismay about what they take to be students' dismissals of their expectations about writing:  once I figured out what she wanted, students sometimes say, it was easy...  But there's some truth to that:  the writing done in different disciplines really does vary considerably in objective, structure, style, evidence, and degree of formality.  Different readers even understand what counts as "error" differently.

We recommend asking your professors for models of good scholarly writing, taking a look at scholarship in the field, even when your professor doesn't require it, and - as a simple way to begin to understand the sort of relativity of disciplinary discourse - consulting the Writing in the Disciplines section of Rules for Writers, the college's required writing handbook.  We also highly recommend the really excellent disciplinary writing guides available at the Harvard Expos site, which offer a much fuller representation of different styles than Rules for Writers, as well as the archive of Dean's Writing Award papers in your discipline.

But of course ultimately, the best resource for a sense of the expectations of your professor is him or her:  if you're at all unsure about this, always ask.

The Office of Learning Services (OLS), located in 302 and 303 Penfield Library, is a great source of assistance at all stages of the writing processes, from interpreting an assignment and developing ideas to imagining a shape for your draft to tips on final editing.  Click here to make an appointment.

If you're looking for reference guides to the sort of writing done in your discipline - and you've already spoken to your professor to get his or her take on it - we can recommend a few.  SUNY Oswego is in the process of developing guides to writing in specific disciplines of our own, but in the meantime there are some very good guides prepared by other colleges and universities available online.  Give these a try:

• Purdue Online Writing Lab Subject-Specific Resources
• Marquette University Department-by-Department Reference Guide

Teaching a Writing Across the Curriculum course may be less complicated than you think.  Generally speaking, in a nutshell:

1. Students should write frequently.
2. They should write thoughtfully, in response to meaningful assignments.
3. You should read your students' work closely, as a mentor, offering regular, formative feedback and evaluating their written work as a significant part of their final grade. 

Of course, there are other things you can do if you're so inclined, too – encouraging a healthy writing and revision process, introducing examples of what you take to be good writing, perhaps even sharing some work of your own with your class. But what really counts most is that students write something that matters at least two or three times during the semester and that you read it closely and have some thoughtful exchange with them about it, encouraging them to revise wherever appropriate.

WAC seminars

If you're teaching one of your department's writing-intensive seminars, offered at introductory and advanced levels, these basic expectations  expand slightly.  Because the seminars are imagined both introductions to and reflections on writing in the major, they should also give some explicit attention to the discipline's expectations about texts.  That is, what are the specific genres, habits of mind, and objectives that characterize writing in your field?  Still, the three goals above -- establishing a course in which students write frequently, thoughtfully, and in the context of meaningfully formative response from reader-mentors -- remain the fundamental touchstones of good practice in Writing Across the Curriculum.  (NOTE:  Not all departments' Writing Plans currently distingush courses as seminars in this way, as the WAC Guidelines recommend.  Consult your plan here if you are unsure about whether your course is listed as a seminar.)

What you don't need to do

No matter what WAC course you're teaching, though, you don’t need to feel responsible for eradicating your students’ mechanical errors, curing their writer’s block, or giving them a lecture on ethos or active verbs.   Of course, if you’re inclined to do it, there’s no reason you shouldn’t work on grammar and other line-level issues with students, counsel them on the writing process,  or make them aware of rhetorical issues.  That’s wonderful.  But teaching a WAC course doesn’t mean you’re expected to be a teacher of writing in a generic sense:  it means you use writing to teach the material in your field and that you call students’ attention to the particular forms of writing important to practice in that field. 

There’s no question that instructors have a range of different objectives when they ask their students to write, and of course it’s part of the mission of the Writing Across the Curriculum Program to promote writing as part of students’ coursework no matter what form the assignment takes.  From our perspective, it’s a good thing whenever students are invited to compose their thoughts in text.  Writers learn from writing.

Still, we think it’s fair to suggest that as a general rule, the best writing assignments should involve students in a process of active thinking, discovering and deepening their ideas as they write, rather than in a kind of passive report of what they’ve learned.  Many formal writing assignments, that is, ask students simply to transcribe information from readings or course notes – to rehearse the course content they’ve absorbed.  These are the sorts of assignments that allow an instructor to read and evaluate them through a kind of checklist of what’s been included and what’s been left out.  We would encourage instructors to go beyond this model, to ask students to do more than simply transcribe or report:  at best, writing should be about exploring, developing, and refining ideas as you articulate them.  It should be at once a process of both communication and learning.

So how do you do this with students?

Here are some ideas based on thoughtful assignments we’ve seen in WAC courses.  It seems to us that these assignments fall into a few characteristic patterns, and we’ve tried to describe them and, wherever possible, offer examples below.

1. Assignments of Application.  The best way to take the measure of an idea is to apply it to things you see around you.  This is what the rhetorician and literary critic I.A. Richards meant when he called language a “speculative instrument.”  The assignment excerpted here, regularly given in PBJ 397, asks students to think about the concepts developed in their PBJ courses in relation to their developing practical experience in the field, “accept[ing], reject[ing] or modify[ing] certain theories on the basis” of that experience.  A Fall 2001 assignment in PSY 100 suggests that pressing current events provide another likely source for this kind of application of course material:  “Using what we know about psychology, hypothesize as to what might make a terrorist fly a plane into a building, killing many innocent people as well as himself.  Be sure to use explicit principles from social psychology.”  The instructor in this course describes students’ responses to this prompt, one option among several on her assignment sheet, as among the strongest and most thoughtful she has ever received.
2. Assignments for Internalizing Key Concepts.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge famously said that participating in a text as a reader often required “the willing suspension of disbelief.”  So does participating in the concepts that form the basis of the intellectual and methodological tools of any discipline.  Can a literary critic do her work without the concepts of genre or subject position?  Can a sociologist do his without the concepts of reification or alienation?  The second option on this assignment from one section of ENG 204, Writing About Literature, invites students to reflect on the concepts undergirding a critical perspective the instructor reports they found especially uncomfortable and foreign:  what's it mean to read for something other than content?
3. Assignments of Assimilation.  It’s common to give assignments that require students to report on information they gather:  go to Penfield and prepare, say, a summary of three articles you find on physician-assisted suicide in Bioethics or Medical journals.  Of course, this requires that students read carefully, absorb different positions well enough to summarize them, and familiarize themselves with the language and stylistic conventions of the field, which is wonderful.  Consider, however, that this can be complicated meaningfully if students are asked to do something to connect those different positions:  how do they speak to one another?  Are they representative of different voices in the discussion they address?  Will they be more and less persuasive to different audiences? See this assignment from ENG 302, an advanced expository writing course focused in this section on research and citation, for an example.
4. Genre Exercises.  Writing Across the Curriculum and Writing in the Disciplines programs are customarily based on the idea that genres, objectives for writing, and stylistic preferences are unavoidably discipline-specific.  (Consider WAC advocate David Russell’s famous insistence that learning “general” writing skills is much like acquiring “general ball-playing skills,” for example – his contention being that practice writing an abstract for a psychology paper will help students no more with the coyly indirect, first-person opening their literary studies professors may favor than the ability to dribble a basketball between their legs will help them in a soccer game.)  For this reason, one of the main projects people rightly connect with WAC courses is instruction in disciplinary forms.  Writers have been learning how to write for centuries through modeling exercises, both consciously and unconsciously, and WAC courses, especially at the gateway level, frequently take up this tradition.  Some courses offer a very close study of central and relatively inflexible genres, others invite students to take up some range of possible but distinct approaches, and still others model more general objectives for writing that students might pursue in a range of voices.  But in any case, one of the most fundamental functions of writing in a WAC course is to introduce students to the language, perspectives, conventions, evidence forms, objectives, and genres practiced in the field.  Doing this self-consciously, we believe, is a good thing.  See the Writing in the Disciplines supplement to the SUNY Oswego edition of Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers for examples of genres and language conventions specific to five different disciplines.
5. Reflections on Disciplinary Writing.  If assignments that require modeling of disciplinary forms are common at the gateway level, reflections on those forms offer a very sensible way to think about the work of a capstone course.  In an assignment from one section of ENG 465, the capstone course in literary criticism, students are required to review and comment on a paper written early in their undergraduate careers in order to ask not how close it comes to a form of literary analysis prescribed by the discipline – as one might well in a gateway course – but how their reading and interpretive practices have changed across four years:  what sort of literary reader have they become, and how is this reflected in their written analyses of literature?

Of course. It would be a great mistake to assume that the only worthwhile form of student writing possible was finished formal papers.  And much informal writing – by which we mean writing mainly for developing or sorting out one’s ideas rather than for communicating an idea to an audience – doesn’t call for teacher response, or at least not for response of the same sort you’d likely give to students’ formal work.  Generally speaking, informal writing is for writers, not for readers or evaluators.  (This makes it especially useful for writing-to-learn courses, we should note, where class sizes may make it difficult to assign as many formal papers as you’d like to.)

So what’s informal writing look like?

It’s increasingly common for instructors to ask students to reflect on required readings or class discussions in course journals, for example, which if done well are often the sites of very significant thinking.  Students frequently find in their journals the seeds of ideas they want to expand on later, in response to formal assignments.  Course blogs or wikis help pave the way for discussion before class meetings and sometimes serve to develop online exchanges as an alternative where class size inhibits face-to-face exchange in course meetings.  Various forms of written interaction between faculty and students do something similar:  asking students in the last five minutes of class to write a response to an open question about how things are going or what they haven’t understood gives them an important opportunity to articulate some idea they’ve been working through.  Many instructors, too, ask students to engage in more focused forms of free-writing to great effect:  apply concept X to the current discussion of Y, or tell me the first time you ever noticed Z, even though you didn’t likely call it that at the time.  

These are important forms of writing to learn, moments when students are called to give their thoughts definition by articulating them, even though they won’t likely call for a response from you or turn up in your grade book.

Informal writing, of course, is no substitute for the sort of finished, carefully revised written work to which instructors should offer thorough and formative response, whether in early drafts, final drafts, or both.  It doesn’t make a course writing-intensive to ask students to free-write in class frequently.  But informal writing serves a very important purpose – indeed, it’s one of the places writing does the most intellectual work for students (and for the rest of us, too!) – and we strongly encourage some use of it in all WAC courses.

Slowly and thoughtfully.  Ideally, faculty in WAC courses should respond to students as supportive mentors, helping them reimagine and reshape what they have to say.  Though of course you can’t possibly work as closely with your students or respond as fully to their work as your dissertation director likely did when you submitted chapter drafts in graduate school, we think the most helpful responses to the work of student-writers emulate  the spirit of those readings, even if on a much smaller scale.  Ask yourself as you read, simply:  why do or don’t these ideas matter and make sense, and what can be done to sharpen and strengthen them?

To this end we strongly recommend these four basic principles:

1. Paraphrasing the student’s main claim at the beginning of your end comment.  One of the most effective formative moves good mentors make involves helping mentees find the language for what they’re trying to say, which is often discipline-specific.  Hearing your ideas paraphrased crisply by someone well-accustomed to the conversations around which they circulate is an important learning experience. 
2. Referring to specific moments in the text and avoiding generalities.  The more focused on textual particulars an instructor’s response is, the more effective the advice.  To say that a student’s thesis is unclear is much less helpful than trying to establish what you think it might be and the specific discussions that seem irrelevant for that reason.  To say that the thesis shifts halfway through is much less helpful than to point out what it was at the beginning, what it shifted to, and when the shift seemed to happen.
3. Offering both an endnote and brief, pointed marginal comments.  Marginal comments are one easy place to offer the sort of specifics that make general observations meaningful:   where do students do things both well and poorly, where do you think there could be further development, and especially where are you confused as a reader?  Developing the sort of running dialogue with a writer that notes in the margins make possible is a powerful way to really intervene in the development of an idea.
4. Remembering that comments on papers are worthless if students don’t read or understand them. Consider setting aside 10 minutes or so at the end of the period in which you return papers to require that students read your comments, conferencing about the papers you return if that’s possible, asking students to write a short note in response to your comments, or – particularly if students don’t find your handwriting legible – using some mark-up utility like the one available on Angel or like MS Word’s track changes feature. One good comment students actually read and understand is worth any number they don’t.  

Sometimes when faculty ask about the best way to respond to student writing, they really mean something more like “Can you tell me about some tricks, some good time-saving devices, that might ease the burden of reading all that student work?” We understand this question entirely:  it’s easy to long for some better approach, even some magical shortcut, when you’re halfway through a stack of student papers and have to get up early to teach.  But we’re inclined to respond that in our opinion – sadly – there really aren’t any magical shortcuts.  Reading closely and responding honestly, in ways that will improve either a revision of the paper in question, future work, or a student-writer’s grasp of the ideas at hand in the paper, takes a lot of time.  This is why the WAC Guidelines are so adamant about restricting the class size of WAC seminars to twenty-five or fewer:  done well, a writing-intensive course involves working closely with student-writers.

Having said that, though, we’d acknowledge that there are a few things to keep in mind as you read student work that might help you avoid some common mistakes and read more efficiently:

1. Recognize that you don’t need to point out every shortcoming of every paper you read.  In fact, though most faculty don’t approach it, there’s probably a limit to what most students can hear about their work at any given moment.  Prioritize your comments with this in mind, maybe saving some for next time.
2. Recognize, likewise, that you don’t need to read every text your students write in the same way – or even to read everything students write at all.  Much of what students write in a good writing-intensive course may well be for them and not for you – notes, free-writes, journals, discovery drafts, etc.  (See Are There Other Ways to Use Writing in Courses Outside Formal Papers?)  And some pieces of writing will call for closer examination than others:  you may choose not to worry about fit and finish in a paper proposal, for example, where what students really need is to some response to their evolving plan for a paper.  And you may well not want to bother reiterating an explanation of where a paper contradicts itself in a final draft if you’ve already done so in response to an earlier draft.
3. If you find it helpful, use the Hacker handbook as a shorthand reference for common issues, especially connected to mechanics.  If you find yourself writing the same comment repeatedly – like plural possessives take the apostrophe after the s or lab reports never use first-person – consider referring students to the fuller discussions in Rules for Writers.  If you let students know what they mean, you can even use section numbers:  36a for possessive apostrophes and Appendix D1-7 for a discussion of disciplinary difference. 
4. Don’t feel obligated to offer detailed support on grammar and mechanics – and by all means don’t proofread.  You’re more than welcome, of course, to commit yourself to eradicating all sentence fragments and subject-verb problems in your students’ work.  If you have time to offer this kind of support to students, that’s wonderful.  But recognize that this involves a significant commitment of time and energy, and that WAC doesn’t see it as a required part of the job (see Grammar and Mechanics).  Instead, consider referring students with recurring grammar difficulties to the campus Writing Center for help – and dedicating a much smaller amount of time instead to arming each student you refer with a list of the specific problems you see in their work:  comma splices, parallel constructions, misplaced commas, misconstructed which clauses, or whatever else you think happens repeatedly in their papers.
5. Consider that responding to drafts can minimize the sort of comment necessary on final versions of a paper.  If you communicate your worries about a project to students in advance (either in writing or through conversation), it may well make the task of responding to the final draft easier – in part because you may help students head off problems that you’d have spent considerable time addressing in an end comment.  Consider, too, that you don’t need to wait until they’ve begun drafting to offer formative response:  we suggest that it’s time very well spent to help students develop initial responses to an assignment, either as a group in class or individually outside it.

Absolutely. For one thing, though you very well may want to warn students about the sort of fit and finish you’ll expect in final work, drafts are thinking documents for most writers, so sentence level issues aren’t usually very important here. Expect polish later.

But the most important thing about responding to drafts is that while end comments on finished work are often written to justify or support a grade – to let student-writers understand a text’s shortcomings – comments on drafts should be more constructive and speculative. Like: I’m not sure I understand the connection between your ideas here – perhaps you mean that… Or: You seem really committed to this idea, which is wonderful. But I worry that this has been so well-established that it’s no longer worth arguing. I wonder if you might consider building instead around the more narrowly defined discussion you begin on page 3. Or: This is a really great insight, and I love how you respond to the previous arguments on this. But you need a really good example. Have you heard about what’s been going on in X or Y? Or even: I suspect you’ve chosen this topic because it seems manageable and safe. But I think there are lots of more interesting and important issues you could consider here. What about what you brought up in class last week?...

When commenting on drafts, imagine yourself in an informal conversation with a colleague you know well. Bounce some thoughts around, ask lots of open-ended questions, connect the idea to other discussions you’ve heard and examples that come to mind. Remember that the purpose here is not to pass judgment but to generate ideas.

Rationales for Writing Across the Curriculum are always talking about how important it is to “develop a healthy writing process” in students, and it’s generally agreed that WAC courses should encourage students to think of writing as a repeated process of drafting and revision. But what is a healthy writing process exactly? Don’t all writers have different processes?

Certainly, writers’ minds work very differently, even idiosyncratically, and it would be a great over-simplification and imposition to feel like we should be squeezing every process of composition into the same mold, as many handbooks do: brainstorm, outline, draft, workshop, redraft, edit. In fact, not only is there great variability between the processes different writers use, but any experienced writer knows very well that he or she seldom follows exactly the same process with different projects. Some require a long gestation period and some none at all. With some pieces, the real work may be in sifting through and adjusting for the comments of multiple readers representing different takes on an issue after drafting formally – often the case with public documents, for example – while the burden of other pieces is in connecting their different sections, which requires more than anything else long hours of hard interior work – as with the chapters of most dissertations.

So while we wouldn’t prescribe any single process for student-writers, what we would recommend is encouraging student-writers to think about their writing projects as the result of some process or other – emphasizing that a paper shouldn’t be done in a single sitting, some number of days (or, certainly, hours!) before it’s due – and building spaces for reflection on students’ developing ideas into your course. Try to get students to ask themselves: what will I write, what have I written, why does it matter, how can it be improved? Pausing for this sort of reflection may be especially effective at certain moments: when they’re interpreting the assignment, when they’re gathering evidence, when they draft, when they begin to organize ideas, when they solicit readings from informed peers, when they edit. Consider, too, that this may well vary with the assignment, which may make certain stages in the composing process more important than others.

The literature in writing studies has long recognized that thoughtful revision is one of the hallmarks of experienced writers and that student-writers typically have great trouble with it. Nancy Somers, for example, pointed this out in a much-cited article in the early 1980s, observing that inexperienced writers make sheerly “lexical” changes – a word here, a phrase there – and that experienced writers bring significantly more “global” considerations to their revisions. That is, experienced writers add, delete, reorganize, even reevaluate their observations or the way they approach their audience.

But how you get students to perform this more ambitious sort of revision, to go beyond line-level editing, is much more difficult. We recommend that you provide lots of built-in opportunities along the way for students to articulate and rearticulate their ideas – opportunities to “look and look again,” as literacy theorist Anne Berthoff put it. Consider asking them to send you a paper proposal, conferencing with them on their idea, requiring them to describe their topic to at least one classmate, encouraging them to workshop drafts with peers, either inside or outside class, and recommending that they reread their work from the position of an opponent in order to anticipate objections.

You might also show them what you mean about revision through a model: heavily marked up drafts of your own work – the work of a published scholar, with cross-outs and arrows and newly inserted discussions – can make a strong impression on students, who often assume that the sign of a “good writer” is the ability to produce flawless and fully formed texts in a single angst-free sitting.

None of this will necessarily make students more capable of refining ideas and constructing carefully crafted discussions, especially in the short term. But we believe it will work against the single draft model to which many students subscribe and help develop the habit of making repeated passes through the same idea, which we believe is fundamentally important to writing clearly and thoughtfully.

To many, grammar seems like the simplest and most foundational of issues in teaching writing, something students learn – or should learn – in “grammar school,” long before they reach college. We’d suggest, however, that it’s actually among the most complicated issues teachers of writing have to deal with and that the process through which writers learn to construct proper, effective, syntactically complex sentences is very different from what many people imagine it to be.

But the very first thing we’d say about grammar to faculty teaching Writing Across the Curriculum courses is that we don’t think you should feel any obligation to teach it as part of a required commitment to WAC. Help students with their grammar if you want to and if you feel you can, by all means. And of course make it clear to students when you find their language either unclear or insufficiently polished. But teaching a writing-intensive course means you’ll already have plenty to do – including constructing assignments that engage students in meaningful writing, reading that work carefully, responding to students’ ideas thoughtfully, and encouraging healthy writing habits. So though it never hurts to point them out, we don’t believe you need to spend time in class leading students through handbook exercises on the possessive apostrophe or comma splices. In fact, many faculty members tell us they don’t feel qualified to work on grammar – that they can edit, for example, but can’t effectively explain the reasons for the changes they’d recommend – and this is a worry we both understand and honor. Being a fluent writer and having the language with which to talk about the construction of sentences are entirely different things.

So if you have the time and inclination, of course, it’s wonderful for WAC teachers to offer support for sentence-level issues. We very much appreciate the inclination to work closely with students on their language. But when you feel your students’ work is disabled by an inability to write either proper or effectively complex sentences, we suggest sending them to the Writing Center for the sort of careful tutoring it’s likely difficult for you to provide.

That said, we’d also offer a few general points of consensus in the scholarship on grammar that may condition how you talk with students about their writing:

1. The majority of sentence-level errors have little or nothing to do with a writer’s ability to formulate or communicate an idea: we object to them for socio-rhetorical reasons. As Maxine Hairston has pointed out, that is, nobody misunderstands the sentence “He brung his secretary with him,” even though Hairston’s work suggests that it’s precisely the kind of error that bothers many of us most (Hairston 796). Instead, we see in it the signs of a lack of preparation or polish that – fairly or unfairly, and reasonable people disagree about this – leads many readers to question the writer’s authority, intelligence, or readiness to participate in civil discussions. Hairston calls these errors “status-markers” (796), and they’re the product of a collision of dialects, systematically variant ways to speak the language, along with a lack of familiarity with the conventions of written as opposed to spoken discourse.
2. We should distinguish these surface-level errors – errors of usage conventions – from errors in what some linguists call sentence-formation rules, which are more troubling. Mina Shaughnessy, one of the pioneers of work in “Basic Writing,” calls these “syntactic” rather than “common” or “inflectional” errors. These are the really disabling errors, and they aren’t easily addressed: when then the various pieces of a sentence don’t hold together tenably, the idea it’s trying to articulate doesn’t either. Working with writers on these sorts of sentences depends on one’s ability to slowly tease out the connections between their different pieces, which is really hard, slow work. This isn’t simply about pointing out patterns of error.
3. Mastery of both aspects of sentence-level writing – both grammar and usage, both “syntactic” and “inflectional” patterns – is developed mainly through practice rather than the elaboration of rules. Though it’s often debated, many who study writing claim that time spent on explicit grammar instruction either has no effect on or in fact actually inhibits a writer’s ability to write in standard ways, since it takes time away from their practice of the language. See Patrick Hartwell’s “Grammar, Grammars, and the Teaching Grammar” for one of the most frequently cited articulations of this argument. Guided practice – beginning with sentences composed by the student him or herself – is a good idea, but we’d recommend that you not waste much time lecturing to the group on complete sentences or the proper use of the semi-colon. We believe the Writing Center is best-positioned to offer this sort of guidance.
4. Fluency and knowledge of grammar structures or rules are in no way the same thing. A writer’s ability to articulate what constitutes an independent clause is separate from his or her ability to construct one reliably. The ability to identify parts of speech and sentence patterns – to define “adjective” or to find indirect objects – neither depends on nor ensures fluency. Don’t imagine that errors will disappear just because you’ve cited the proper handbook passage or named the rule; as much as you can, illustrate it with reference to the student’s own work – or, again, send the student to the Writing Center, where they have more time to do this.
5. A writer’s propensity for error and the intellectual challenges of what he or she is writing are directly related. The fact that a student makes errors in a paper he or she has prepared for you doesn’t necessarily mean that the language itself is really his or her problem. It’s for this reason that Composition and Rhetoric scholar David Bartholomae calls some errors “markers of development in a writer” – signs that a writer may be struggling to articulate some important new concept or perspective.
6. Standards of usage are profoundly relative. Not all educated users of the language by any means agree on what constitutes the appropriate way to use it: what you regard as error may very well not be shared by everyone else on campus. The Hairston study cited above, called “Not All Errors are Created Equal,” gave 65 sentences containing errors to readers and asked them to characterize their responses as “Does Not Bother Me,” “Bothers Me a Little,” or “Bothers Me A Lot” (Hairston 795). None of the sixty-five questions elicited a universal response among the eighty-four respondents, and most drew significantly divided responses. We don’t mean that instructors shouldn’t have their own preferences about usage or that they shouldn’t ask students to observe them when those preferences reflect shared disciplinary norms, as they often do. But we do suggest that instructors should keep in mind that their students – and other educated readers, too – may well not share them and so may well see them as arbitrary and foreign.
7. Correction is sometimes more about social context and the relations between readers and writers than it is about anything absolute in the language. Joseph Williams, former Director of the Writing Program at the University of Chicago, could give us some pointers on this. Famous for his sentence-level “Little Red Schoolhouse” pedagogy and his frequently assigned stylebook called Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace, Williams also famously authored an article called “The Phenomenology of Error” in which he argued that error was a phenomenon of reading – a relationship between readers, writers, and the language conventions they choose – rather than predictable violations to a static and finite set rules. To prove his point, he inserted “about 100 errors” (Phenomenology 165) into his own article, revealing this fact only at the end. Just as Williams imagined, few first-time readers report noticing any errors at all, in large part, Williams claims, out of deference to his position as a published author. We might notice these errors, he suggests, when we’re trained to be looking for them – say, when we read the work of students, who we’re encouraged to think of as apprentice writers in need of instruction – but not in a journal article by an expert on sentence-level prose. Any errors included in his article that we didn’t object to on an uninformed first reading, he contends – dangling participles, pronoun case, split infinitives – “should then not be among those we look for first when we read a student paper.” (Phenomenology 164).
8. You set the terms for your discipline’s expectations about language as you read and respond to student work. Are you giving too much or too little attention to grammar and mechanics when you read and grade student work? As with most other criteria for judging texts, the Writing Across the Curriculum program takes a largely laissez-faire approach to this question: we believe that your field’s readers will set the standard for its expectations about grammar and mechanics. Some fields place a much higher emphasis on propriety and uniformity than others, and some value complexity of sentence structure, while others show great preference for simplicity and directness. This is natural and as it should be, and while we would dissuade any instructors from applying idiosyncratic or arbitrary standards to student writing, we would also encourage you to keep faith with your instincts about what constitutes appropriate language in your field. You know what matters at the sentence level, just as you know what matters in terms of larger issues like objective, structure, and forms of evidence.

Works Cited

Bartholomae, David. "Inventing the University." Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 523-553. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 26 Nov. 2011.

Hairston, Maxine. "Not All Errors Are Created Equal: Nonacademic Readers In The Professions Respond To Lapses In Usage." College English 43.8 (1981): 794-806. ERIC. Web. 24 Nov. 2011.

Hartwell, Patrick. "Grammar, Grammars, And The Teaching Of Grammar." Cross-Talk in Comp Theory: A Reader. 205-233. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 2011. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 26 Nov. 2011.

Shaughnessy, Mina. Errors and Expectations: A Guide for the Teacher of Basic Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Williams, Joseph M. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. Glenview, IL: Scott, Foresman, 1981.

Williams, Joseph M. "The Phenomenology of Error." College Composition and Communication 32.2 (1981): 152-168. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 26 Nov. 2011.