At our last professional development session (which probably deserves a separate blog entry) there was a discussion about the publication of “A Writer’s Resource: A Handbook for Writing and Research” by Elaine Maimon, and Janice Peritz. The discussion focused mainly on educational publishing and its complicated relationship with the academic world. I want to mention something more concrete and practical that came to my mind while I was listening to Janice Peritz. She mentioned that one of the chapters in her handbook lists some major grammatical points that students needs to work on in order to make their writing clear. I believe she started with 6 points in her draft and then had to extend them to 12. I think this would be a nice reference to give to our students at Baruch (and elsewhere).
While reviewing a number of student drafts, I noticed that there are quite a few common errors, like subject-verb agreement, dangling modifiers, their vs. there, punctuation, etc. I think it might be useful to give out some such reference to students in the beginning of the semester (put it on the CIC’s Blackboard site or just hand it out). A whole chapter from that handbook would probably be daunting (and bulky) for students, so we could develop something more laconic that would include references to additional resources for those who want them. We could even distribute this among teachers, so that they could give it to students selectively. I think especially the professors who are teaching something other than composition or literature would appreciate that. There surely are similar resources online and in different handbooks, but somehow students often don’t get to them.
Do you all think this is worth doing?
I’ve found that resources like that are useful for students after they recieve our feedback rather than as a preventative measure. Some folks use references from handbooks like this and Keys For Writers, the one required in Baruch’s introductory writing courses, directly in their comments: “subject-verb agreement: see section G2-1b” — this works best if students are required to revise problematic sentences and keep a log of the revisions they make.
Reply to Mikhail
You might be right about giving this resource as a feedback. It’s true that we often don’t realize that we are making a mistake before it gets pointed out to us. But we might want to have some resource like this on hand (which should be easily personalizable). After all, we learned that there is a large number of students who transferred to Baruch from other colleges, where they might not have had an equivalent writing course.
Reply to Yana