Passive Voice and Other Obstacles

At the beginning of the semester I did not have any great plans to teach grammar principles. Then I decided to steal a bit from Emily and maybe talk about one grammar principle a day. Small doses, like vitamins. I began with passive voice and it was so horrifying that I haven't given them a grammar principle since. Instead I've tried to address things as I see them in papers and as we workshop, and I mark them in their papers with the hope that they will recognize what they are doing wrong and correct it. The marking strategy has only worked slightly. Sometimes the mistake gets corrected and sometimes I just keep seeing it. I try not to get discouraged, but when you mark the same thing on a person's paper over and over again it gets frustrating.

Some of the writing principles we've discussed in class are less about grammar and more about organization. We've talked about wordiness in their papers. On their first essays we put papers up on the overhead and worked through sentences. We pointed out where things got wordy, we eliminated unecessary words, and we made sure the idea was clear. I've talked about punctuation a little. I tell them to avoid colons and semi-colons, just because they do not usually use them right. During one workshop day we talked about how to start sentences. One student asked if she could start sentences with "and" or "but" and I told her no because it leads to sentence fragments. We then had a small conversation about sentence fragments.

Just recently we spent quite a bit of time working on finding the thesis and topic sentence. I wanted to prove a point so I asked my students to find the thesis in one of the articles we read. They all pointed out sentences at the end of the article, so I had to direct them back to the beginning. They had no idea where the thesis was. Then I asked them to find the topic sentence in one of the paragraphs and all of them guessed sentences from the middle of the paragraph to the end of the paragraph. Not one of them thought to look at the beginning. I had to spend a little bit of time addressing the purpose of a topic sentence and where it is supposed to go. I plan on spending some time working through that when we begin workshopping.

I think the next time I teach this class I want to steal from my fellow students. I like the idea of using my students' own papers as examples on the overhead of bad grammar, or even as examples of good grammar. I think that will help them recognize what they are doing wrong.