First Day to Final Grade: A Graduate Student's Guide to Teaching, Second Edition by Anne Curzan & Lisa Damour

Author:Anne Curzan & Lisa Damour
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: ISBN-13: 9780472031887
Published: 2014-09-17T12:00:00+00:00

Grammar and Usage Review

When to Use It

In a course in which you are reading student writing, you may find yourself becoming frustrated by recurring usage problems. This activity is a quick and easy way to review and correct common usage mistakes.

When you do this exercise, you can remind students that part of “good grammar” is mastering a set of written conventions. The written language differs from the spoken, and your students may not always be able to find a logic to a particular written convention; but in many contexts, they will be judged by their control of these grammatical usage rules. Setting up written grammar in this way can make this exercise seem more like a challenging game than a test of the students’ intellect or fluency.

Advance Preparation

for the Teaching Assistant

Select eight to ten sentences from your students’ writing that exemplify the problems you want to tackle. You may need to alter students’ sentences slightly or make up a couple of examples. Using actual student writing makes the exercise seem less abstract, and students usually find the usage issues in their own writing to be more amusing than embarrassing (and the sentences are anonymous unless a student opts to claim ownership during class).

Keep the sentences fairly short so that the students do not become distracted from the targeted usage questions. Choose your sentences thematically: do not try to cover ten different usage problems; select two or three problems instead (e.g., comma splices, lack of parallelism, dangling modifiers) and use the sentences to cover different variations of these problems.

Type these sentences onto a handout (without the student authors’ names). Make sure to leave space between the sentences so that students can add their corrections.

Sentence Revision (a.k.a. Usage Questions)

Revise the following sentences so that they are clear and no longer contain usage problems. (Some of these sentences should look familiar!)

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