the importance of being able to write
Nov. 23rd, 2010 11:13 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
aryanhwyOn my way to and from Munich this weekend, on the plane I read this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education and all of the comments that had been posted by the time I downloaded it Thursday night (~350). I thought of three things while doing so:
- First, it cements in me my belief that it doesn't matter what subject I am teaching, I will continue to grade papers for grammar, spelling, and style in addition to content. I still remember when one of my philosophy undergrads at Madison complained when I marked up every grammar mistake on her paper -- "But this isn't an English class, you should only be grading me on content, not style." My response was basically "If your style is poor enough, it will obscure the content. If you have misused grammar so that I cannot tell what the subject of the sentence is, or what the referent of a pronoun is, or that one sentence is supposed to be the support/evidence for another, and not vice versa, then I cannot determine the content of your paper." In Amsterdam, when people complain about when I grade on style matters, I tell them that these are the things that will prevent their papers from being accepted to journals. (The number of referee reports that come through saying "Be sure to get a native speaker to proof the paper before resubmitting it" is very high.) If you have a borderline paper that is phenomenally well-written, it's going to have a better chance than a borderline (or even decent) paper that is poorly-written. So! I don't care how much you complain, I'm going to continue marking up your spelling and grammar mistakes.
- I actually found it bothersome the number of people who said that they develop a feel for a student's style and thus can tell when they submit something that is not in their style. On the one hand, in principle this is nice. On the other hand, I don't like this non-anonymizing of students during the grading process. It makes it too easy to play favorites, even subconsciously. If you get a paper from a good student, you're going to expect it to be good. If you get a paper from a poor student, you're going to expect it to be poor. I know that this affects me sometimes when I am grading, and so to counteract this I grade per question rather than per homework, I randomize the order that I grade the homeworks/papers in, and once I've gotten past the first page, I never go back and look at the student's name until toting up the final sum. Of course, this doesn't completely anonymize things; people who had in handwritten work, I get to know them by their handwriting pretty quickly, and people who submit in LaTeX have their own LaTeX style which also becomes pretty identifiable. But I do this anyway because it does help.
- One commenter (#320) suggested that a database of student writing be kept and that if the writing of any past or future student resemble it too much (according to some measure), then that student's degree be revoked. (The idea being that this would only happen if the said student was writing for one of the paper mills like Ed Dante.) I am absolutely 100% against such an idea because it means that if someone plagiarized from me in the future, I could lose my degree. This is not a system that will work.
ETA: I remembered one more thing that I'd thought of:
- Various people also suggested comparing the writing in people's assignments with their out of class writing, and flag any serious discrepancies. I have serious issue with that. I'd say my academic writing is pretty good (in both style and content). Yet if a teacher compared it with what I type on IM, he'd probably conclude that the same person couldn't have written both. (Especially if he'd looked at my conversation the afternoon I descended into fever + low-blood-sugar induced incoherency, where I couldn't type any polysyllabic word with any degree of accuracy, and often failed on a number of the monosyllabic ones too.) This is because on IM, it's often a trade up between fixing a typo and sending it as it is and letting the conversation continue w/o delay. And most of my friends can interpret what I meant, and I do the same for them.
- First, it cements in me my belief that it doesn't matter what subject I am teaching, I will continue to grade papers for grammar, spelling, and style in addition to content. I still remember when one of my philosophy undergrads at Madison complained when I marked up every grammar mistake on her paper -- "But this isn't an English class, you should only be grading me on content, not style." My response was basically "If your style is poor enough, it will obscure the content. If you have misused grammar so that I cannot tell what the subject of the sentence is, or what the referent of a pronoun is, or that one sentence is supposed to be the support/evidence for another, and not vice versa, then I cannot determine the content of your paper." In Amsterdam, when people complain about when I grade on style matters, I tell them that these are the things that will prevent their papers from being accepted to journals. (The number of referee reports that come through saying "Be sure to get a native speaker to proof the paper before resubmitting it" is very high.) If you have a borderline paper that is phenomenally well-written, it's going to have a better chance than a borderline (or even decent) paper that is poorly-written. So! I don't care how much you complain, I'm going to continue marking up your spelling and grammar mistakes.
- I actually found it bothersome the number of people who said that they develop a feel for a student's style and thus can tell when they submit something that is not in their style. On the one hand, in principle this is nice. On the other hand, I don't like this non-anonymizing of students during the grading process. It makes it too easy to play favorites, even subconsciously. If you get a paper from a good student, you're going to expect it to be good. If you get a paper from a poor student, you're going to expect it to be poor. I know that this affects me sometimes when I am grading, and so to counteract this I grade per question rather than per homework, I randomize the order that I grade the homeworks/papers in, and once I've gotten past the first page, I never go back and look at the student's name until toting up the final sum. Of course, this doesn't completely anonymize things; people who had in handwritten work, I get to know them by their handwriting pretty quickly, and people who submit in LaTeX have their own LaTeX style which also becomes pretty identifiable. But I do this anyway because it does help.
- One commenter (#320) suggested that a database of student writing be kept and that if the writing of any past or future student resemble it too much (according to some measure), then that student's degree be revoked. (The idea being that this would only happen if the said student was writing for one of the paper mills like Ed Dante.) I am absolutely 100% against such an idea because it means that if someone plagiarized from me in the future, I could lose my degree. This is not a system that will work.
ETA: I remembered one more thing that I'd thought of:
- Various people also suggested comparing the writing in people's assignments with their out of class writing, and flag any serious discrepancies. I have serious issue with that. I'd say my academic writing is pretty good (in both style and content). Yet if a teacher compared it with what I type on IM, he'd probably conclude that the same person couldn't have written both. (Especially if he'd looked at my conversation the afternoon I descended into fever + low-blood-sugar induced incoherency, where I couldn't type any polysyllabic word with any degree of accuracy, and often failed on a number of the monosyllabic ones too.) This is because on IM, it's often a trade up between fixing a typo and sending it as it is and letting the conversation continue w/o delay. And most of my friends can interpret what I meant, and I do the same for them.
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no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 02:27 pm (UTC)*facepalm*
You can tell your students that in the real world, people care about grammar and spelling. I have seen judges take lawyers to task in public for briefs filled with typos and bad grammar. I also regularly get complimented, particularly by older judges, for following the rules of grammar.
no subject
Date: 2010-11-23 03:55 pm (UTC)Guess how many employers do the 'first pass' when selecting interviewees for jobs?! By throwing out the ones that are badly spelled...
no subject
Date: 2010-11-24 12:43 am (UTC)