it's annoying because this is upper college level work and they should know better so either they don't or they don't care
unbelievable
am i wrong for assuming college students should know better
'then' and 'than' is pretty easy to remember so i don't know how they will redefine it
I used to explicitly state in my syllabus that my class doesn’t include grammar but that grammar affects grades. That was followed by the building and room number for the Writers’ Center.
Each paper I assigned included what penalty I’d assign for, shall we say, “gross negligence” on that front. The first paper was more lenient and each became progressively more stringent. I forget how I framed it exactly but points would be docked. Not very much on the early essays but by the end, yeah. Give or take, on the first paper I’d mark grammar errors on each page; second paper I’d do that on the first page but pages thereafter would circle new offenses but give no further detail. And so on. I’d also provide pointers in early drafts so they had an idea what to look for if they bothered to proofread.
Confronting this Day One would get people on notice. Some would drop because I seemed tough. That made room for adding waitlisted students or, better still, leaving me with a more manageable class. Early on I also shared a “pro tip” I was taught by one of my better professors: “scrub the first page of errors s when they’re most obvious. If the writing is engaging enough and meeting the assignment’s basic goal then the professor is less likely to notice them later on once they’re in the flow.”
I also assigned regular journal entries and minor prompts. On those I stressed I didn’t care about grammar at all. On average, journal entries’ grammar improved over the semester. I took that as a positive indicator that habits were improving that might make life easier for professors further downstream.
Lest it seem unusually cruel, I was more lenient than I indicated. If a paper was well-written enough — whether with strong content, engaging voice (which means some creative grammar that’s not always “perfect”), etc.
I’d... well, sometimes even a professor doesn’t catch everything, so....
Also, for those who haven’t taught and who don’t appreciate the unpaid hours it takes to grade, the more time a professor has to waste on grammar the less time they can focus on the more complex and valuable aspects of writing. A semester could mean four or five essays, each with two to three drafts to assess mostly on mundane topics, mind you. Multiply that by 25 students per class with a load of three to five sections per semester...? With no job security, no benefits, etc. The least a student can do is learn that when spell check catches the word “definately” they shouldn’t choose the first option: “defiantly.” If I had a nickel for every time I encountered that! Or explaining that emoji aren’t acceptable. Yeah, that’s a thing.
I mean, maybe I wouldn’t mind if I didn’t have to waste so much time adjusting two-inch margins and triple spaced essays that insult my intelligence by trying to fake assignment lengths or waste it chasing plagiarism rampant in this “copy-paste” era. Poor grammar eats into the time needed to shore up critical thinking skills seemingly deprecated in secondary education.
Not taking grammar seriously by shrugging , smiling, and passing them along as if it won’t ultimately hurt them to do so is tantamount to malpractice. Of course, most people aren’t students; they’re molded by the students they once weren’t either more finely tuned or more lackadaisical. PRSI is a fine Petrie dish. Cluttered thoughts that pile on fallacies under a thick icing of sarcasm is rampant and ultimately leads to numbing bickering. That’s the eventual destination of undisciplined writing and discourse. Sure I’m amused by those reddit posts above but they make me sad. Somewhere along the line people gave up either teaching or maybe learning. Yes, language evolves and what was wrong a decade ago is often enough acceptable now, but making exceptions into rules is an excuse for laziness masked as “hot take” nonchalance.
That all said, I’m pretty certain this post has a few errors I won’t go back to check or fix. On the other hand, the few people here who got this far down my ramble probably didn’t mind them. That’s probably because I internalized that if I wanted to be understood I needed to be mindful as I laid out my thoughts. I also learned that those too impatient to be mindful of their own writing would likely have been indifferent enough to stop right around my (arguably correct) use of quotes around “gross negligence” above.
