It's Crazy Talk

Am I a Grammar Nazi?  Though my students might say so, and perhaps The Lockport Union-Sun & Journal might say so, I'm not.  I don't stop people in regular conversation to point out grammar errors, nor do I always speak or write in perfect English, but I do notice when I find errors in print.  Student papers?  To be expected.  Professional newspapers?  All hail the Grammar Nazi!

Please read the headline from this June 14, 2012 article and tell me what's wrong.  I'll wait.

If you didn't barf a little in your mouth, you didn't notice.  Reread, and this time read out the contraction... there's the barf.

Now read the large text meant to highlight the article's great wisdom.  NOTE: this error is tougher to spot.

Did you notice comma splice making it a run-on sentence?  Though, after the super basic "it's" vs. "its" error in the title, I wouldn't expect them to find a comma splice.

What grammar error annoys you the most?  Have you actually found it in print?  I'll keep posting them!  Finding bad grammar in professional publications is becoming more a given than a hunt.  I'm scared.  Very, very scared.  It's...its...it's...its... er... It is not funny!

Seriously, They Have an Editor?

I live in a small city surrounded by farms and trailer parks.  This is the city that when you mention it by name in the "real" city nearby, people shudder and wonder how you could live so intolerably far away.  This city has everything you'd expect in a big city: loud music thumping from pimped out cars, public urination, teenagers lurking on the sidewalks, "Mister Natural Ice" dumping his empties on lawns, gun violence.  We also have stores specializing in camouflage and chicken feed, tractors slowing down traffic, the smell of manure and not a Starbucks in sight.  This city even has a real newspaper: The Lockport Union-Sun & Journal.

I include for your inspection a picture and caption from the front page of the Monday, June 4, 2012 edition.  I read it and my eye started twitching.  What do you think?  (Clicking on the picture will make it large enough to read easily.)

What irritated me the most:

• Ending a sentence with a proposition. In casual communications, whatever, but in a newspaper?
• The dryer actually made its way around the house?  The dryer?  *sigh*
• "...surrounding stuff..."  Stuff?!?  Why not "things" or "junk" or "like, whatever"?  Can't think of a word?  Don't worry, "stuff" works for all kinds of things!

What part of this caption irritates you the most?  If you have your own irritating newspaper article, please feel free to send it to me and I'll post it here.

Eenie, Meenie, Meinee… C+?

Calculating the grades for a writing class is much more art than science. How I would love to have only “multiple guess” tests to grade—better yet, Scantron—instead of a mound of mushy, subjective, eight to ten page student research papers.

I accepted my first adjunct professor position less than a year after I graduated with my Master’s in English Education. I took in my first load of papers about three weeks after that. It was the moment after I read the first paper that I realized I had NO idea how to grade.

In grad school, the professors used words like “paradigm”, “rubric” and “rhetorical”. I went home and looked them up in a dictionary. The grad school professors tossed around these words like we knew what they meant, and most of the students nodded and tried to look sophisticated while wishing somebody had the guts to say, “Er…what?” We looked at high school papers and puzzled out the anonymous students’ cognitive development based on handwriting factors. We heard over and over again that “multicultural = good”. We learned that the most fantastic idea for a writing class (and for investors in 3-ring binder stock) is called a “portfolio”.

What I never got was an explanation, an example, or a template (I mean a rubric) for grading.

So, how DO you grade a pile of papers?

• Read them all. (Try to ignore the fact that Timmy is a douche bag and concentrate on his writing.)
• Make yourself a cup of peppermint tea to quell the nausea that rises as you imagine yourself having to read them again.
• Read them again, this time pen in hand. Red pen is traditional, but I’ve found it scares students too much so now I use blue. Avoid committing to actual grades.
• Play some Spider Solitaire to let your mind go blank.
• Read them again, this time making helpful comments at the bottom while trying not to overuse the words “awkward”, “wordy” and “sucks”. Continue to avoid grading.
• Wash the dishes, vacuum, dust, reorganize your DVD collection, watch You’ve Got Mail again, print those return address labels you’ve been meaning to make for the past year. In other words: avoid.
• Force yourself to read them again (skim, at least). Find the best and the worst—now you’ve got your A and your F. Sort the rest based on those first two. (Use the “Douche Bag Scale” for any students on the cusp.)
• Try not to think about the fresh pile of papers you’ll get in about two weeks.

Grading = Guessing + How Much of a Pain in the Butt Were You?

Jimmy is a model student. He listens attentively and takes careful notes. When teacher asks a question, more often than not, Jimmy’s hand will be politely raised to just above his right ear and he always has a thoughtful answer. If Jimmy doesn’t understand a lesson, he asks a pertinent question that invariably helps the entire class. His work is always on time and it steadily improves as class progresses.

Jimmy gets an A.

Timmy is a douche bag. He constantly talks to his neighbor during class and rarely brings a working pen. When teacher asks a question, Timmy either mutters a wiseacre comment to anyone listening, or he will shout out the first thing that pops into his head, relevant or not. If Timmy doesn’t understand a lesson, it’s because he’s been texting his friends all class or because he has fallen asleep under his hoodie. His work, however, is never late, though it usually has mustard stains. As it turns out, Timmy went to an excellent high school and he has a natural talent for writing. Timmy’s final work is of exactly the same caliber as Jimmy’s.

What grade should Timmy get?
What grade will Timmy get?
What grade do you want to give Timmy?

For this reason, and this reason only, teachers have always had a sizable portion of their final grading chart devoted to “The Douche Bag Contingency Reserve”, a.k.a. “Class Participation”.

The adventures of grading to be continued in “Eenie, Meenie, Meinee… C+?”

The Computer Ate My Homework

This is the age of technology and my students would be lost without their gadgets. Because they’re so used to typeface, today’s students have a difficult time reading cursive handwriting. Even teachers can’t imagine accepting a pile of hand-written final papers, though they probably can remember handing in their own, carefully copied over essays.

Even though I was born prior to the home computer; even though my elementary school had a single computer on a big cart that they pushed from room to room, giving each student half a minute to meander a pointless maze with a black and white “bunny” (just an oddly shaped cursor); even though I typed all my high school essays, and half my college papers, on a Smith Corona, seeing only four lines at a time; despite all of my handicaps, I am able to perform many different technological feats that are, apparently, marvels to my students.

- I can word process.
- I can save a file.
- I can backup a file.
- I can change the ink in my printer.
- I can add paper to my printer.
- I can silence my cell phone.
- I can use email.
- I can use and reload a stapler.
- And I can still remember how to program a VIC-20 in BASIC to fill a screen with the word “Hello!”

Why, then, are my students, who probably had personal computers in their cribs, technological morons?

Because their dogs ate their homework.


10 print “Hello!”;
20 goto 10

Rude Awakening: Your Parents Aren’t Any Good at Writing, Either

“I don’t understand,” Ashlee complained, her pink-glossed lip trembling. “I sent my draft to my parents to fix.”

“You what?”

“My parents sent me copies of articles they said would work for my paper, and they corrected my draft, so I don’t see how I could have gotten a D-!”

The three page research paper flopped limply in Ashlee’s hand. The ink I added to it with my comments easily doubled the weight of her “research” that was short seven pages and four sources. I could practically smell the horrid thing as it hung there. It stank.

Kyle was also holding his stillborn paper. “My cousin is a published author, and he doesn’t understand why I got such a low grade, either.”

“He actually read your paper?”

“Yeah.”

“And he still doesn’t understand why it’s a D?”

“He thinks it’s much better than that. An A- or B+ at least.”

“Is he ‘published’ on a thing called a ‘blog’?”

I’m sorry, people. I hate to be the one to break it to you. Those folks you’re asking to help you are just not good writers. It might be your mom, your dad, your sister, brother, cousin, grandparent or weird Great Uncle Roy, but apparently a mental block concerning the use of commas runs in your family. It’s a wonder any of your ancestors were able to communicate enough to even understand they wanted to mate.

May I suggest, my revelation-dazed pupils, that you start now to graft fresh DNA, preferably from someone with literacy skills, onto your family tree?

“100% Original and Non-Plagiarized Term Paper Writing Services”

I tell my students on the first day of class:
I would rather see the biggest, steamiest hunk of corn-studded writing you created yourself, than a good paper you didn’t.

And still, some will try.

What is the point of going to college—which is, despite current societal pressures, entirely voluntary (see previous posts)—if you’re not going to do the work?

There are many services on the internet dedicated to selling papers to college students. You can get an awful paper for free, increasingly decent papers for increasing amounts of money, all the way up to a custom-written paper based on the actual assignment for as much as $38 per page. (One site even advertised “100% Original and Non-Plagiarized Term Paper Writing Services.” Say, WHAT?!?)

The biggest clue that I have been given a plagiarized paper is that it’s too good to be true. The vocabulary is appropriate and multi-syllabic. The facts are interesting and well-integrated. The paragraphs are sophisticated, relevant and a joy to read. It is clearly not my student’s writing.

Without knowing my student, without researching any portion online, see if you can recognize the following passage as plagiarism. It was the beginning of a research paper titled “Russian Revolutions” that was my very first brush with this kind of cheating:

The abdication of Emperor Nicholas II in March 1917, in conjunction with the establishment of a provisional government based on Western principles of constitutional liberalism, and the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in November are the political focal points of the Russian Revolutions of 1917 (Carr 24).

By the second page when I read the words, “repudiate annexationist ambitions,” I knew without a doubt I’d been had.

Yes, I caught him, but one paper late. “Russian Revolutions” was a revision he handed in on the last day of class. I found it was plagiarized, gave him the zero, and turned in his grade… then, not wanting to believe my “benefit of the doubt” was really “ignorance”, I belatedly thought that maybe he plagiarized his other paper, too. It had been a B paper, and it had sounded like him… but I looked it up anyway: plagiarized.

I was pissed.

I went to the director of the Writing 100 Department, who also ran the History Department and didn’t really give a rat’s tuchas about my puny class. I told him my story and asked what we could do about reversing this student’s grade. He laughed. He laughed and told me a story about when a kid plagiarized a paper but didn’t change the fact that it said Jimmy Carter was still president.

I said, “Oooh-kay. So what can I do about this student?”

The answer was: NOTHING. He would do nothing. I could do nothing. I finished what I had to do for that semester, and I quit. I also swore I’d never be back, but here I am. They have since reorganized and given Writing 100 its own department. There are also clear measures in place to deal with plagiarism. But I’m not letting plagiarism happen again. Not in MY classroom.

DON’T let it happen in yours.