Why D.O.L. Doesn't Work

[Mark Pennington]

Why do we continue to teach grammar and mechanics with a strategy that simply does not work? Why do we force students to rehearse errors and teach grammar exclusively out of the writing context? Would love to hear your responses. More on my rant at Why D.O.L. Doesn't Work and, more importantly, a grammar/mechanics warm-up/opener/bell-ringer that uses a balanced approach of error analysis and model writing is detailed at Sentence Lifting: D.O.L. That Makes Sense.

[Laura Gibbs]

Mark, your post about Why D.O.L. Doesn't Work gave me a lot to think about. One thing to say first off is that if you want to reach college instructors, you can't assume they know anything about D.O.L. - your post started "Most teachers are familiar with Daily Oral Language, abbreviated as D.O.L" - thank goodness you glossed it... because it's not a term I know! Like most college instructors, I received no formal training of any kind in writing instruction - most college instructors are trained in their subject matter with no pedagogy instruction at all, much less in how to teach writing (far harder to teach than subject matter). Writing is something that really is not "taught" at the universities outside of freshman composition (professors don't have time to teach it, even if they had a strategy for how to do it) - instead, a paper is assigned, turned it in at the end of the semester, the professor may (or may not) write extensive comments, the students may (or may not) read those comments and, worst of all, there is no rewrite - so insofar as learning consists of a process of self-improvement, students rarely get a chance to do that with their writing in the college setting.

So, here is the situation I find myself in, teaching at college level (a big state university): college students gain a level of sophistication in college by being exposed to lots of ideas, by listening to their professors, by talking in class or with each other, and just by being young adults (and sometimes older adults) with a range of experiences to draw on. They have plenty of ideas to write about, and they are more or less able to string those ideas together... but, in general, their writing mechanics are appalling. Even my best students are hesitant in their use of English punctuation, and my struggling students cannot use punctuation at all. They cannot spell, so their writing is littered with spelling errors from homonyms that the spellchecker cannot catch, along with incongruous words suggested to them by the spelllchecker which they choose higgledy-piggledy, not knowing any better. Setting off appositives with commas??? IN MY DREAMS. I'm just hoping to fend off comma splices... which are rampant!

I'm making a concerted effort this year to really work on the writing mechanics issue much harder than I have in the past. Sadly, I found myself turning into my students' proofreader, which is not a good thing at all - it's better than nothing, of course, because my class is based on a semester-long writing process with revision, so at least they had the experience of correcting their own writing. But working on writing mechanics was a very mechanical experience so to speak, and for many of the students, they did not actually learn much, except to become more intensely aware of their own lack of knowledge about English spelling and punctuation.

But here's the problem I face: if a student is getting straight A's in college, and in their other classes it really doesn't matter at all if they use commas or not, use apostrophes or not, spell correctly or not... then how on earth do I make them really care about this? SHOULD they even care about it? I often feel like someone who is trying to teach deaf people how to speak, which everyone knows is a huge pedagogical challenge AND a very controversial project within the deaf community.

When my students read their own writing and each other's writing, they really do not care if there are commas or not. They do not feel the lack of the apostrophe. They sound out the words as they read, so to them all homonyms are created equal.

So, how do you persuade students that punctuation and spelling is something other than a petty imposition...?

After all, historically speaking, I know that for most of the history of the English language, our spelling and punctuation have been outrageously chaotic. I spend a lot of time working on 16th and 17th-century English texts, where the spelling and punctuation are so hilarious sometimes that I burst out laughing.

What do you think? Are we actually drifting out of this aberrant period of "correctness," which has lasted, let's say, around 200 years, in order to begin a new period of English writing with totally chaotic punctuation and spelling...? Much as it was in the past...? Shakespeare managed to write his plays even though he would get failing marks for spelling and punctuation from the grammar mavens today...

Which is why I ask myself: should I even worry about this? It is very time-consuming indeed to worry about it, as I do. As you can see, I'm very curious what you think about this... it's something I struggle with literally every single day of my job, and I guess it is the biggest challenge I face as a teacher! You have taken on this huge task of tackling the problem directly, and I would really like to know if you also have some doubts about it, and how you deal with those doubts... especially if the students are brave enough to voice those doubts as well!

[Ellen Pham]

Beautiful response, Laura. I suspect it isn't as important to them, and we are in a state of flux in regards to correct usage of our language. This makes me think of my grandmother, who only went to school through the fourth grade, did not write extensively in her adult life-time, but could write beautifully, from an aesthetic as well as a grammatical standpoint, which is evidenced by the enduring letters from Santa and the Tooth Fairy that she wrote to her children : ).

If I thought about it more I could probably come up with some theory that links the history of printing with the rise and fall of correct usage.

Still, correct usage can be important to an adult life. My daughter writes many grants in her work as an independent filmmaker, and I think it stands her in good stead that her ideas are beautifully expressed and constructed, even if it hasn't yet led to a lot of funding!

About commas- do you think it would help the students to put something like the book, "Eats, Shoots and Leaves" on their reading list? Out of all the grammar rules, comma usage really can make a difference in meaning!

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Ellen, I definitely play the "you will need to write well to impress other people" card as often as I can... although when my own students become the people who are reviewing those grant applications, they aren't going to notice if the grant applications are well-written or not, eh? That's what is so weird about this: I have straight-A students, very talented people who will be going to top-flight graduate schools, law school, etc. - and their writing is pretty deplorable. Note: I am not complaining about the CONTENT of their writing (it's great, very enjoyable reading, which is why I like my job so much)... the problem I am worried about is this weird crisis of writing mechanics and what seems to me a real shift in the students' perception of what good writing is and which rules really matter.

Eats, Shoots and Leaves, though, is a book I am really ambivalent about: her tone is very much that of the "grammar policewoman" - and she is not really interested in the historical relativity of these rules. She seems to be writing for insiders, not really to convert people who are not already "true believers" in the rule of grammar.

Although an example I share with some of my students (but not all, lest they be offended) is the expression "Eat shit and die" which - like "Eats shoots and leaves" - can be completely changed by the addition of a comma, ha ha.

The problem I run into, though, is that MOST of the time, the punctuation does not change the meaning. So, I do treasure those examples where it does change the meaning - like the difference between "man-eating shark" and "man eating shark"... but at the same time, when I tell my students they need to write "ninety-year-old woman" instead of "ninety year old woman" I cannot honestly claim that the hyphen there removes any real ambiguity, as it does in the shark example.

So it's hard: I like to say that punctuation really is important... but, you know, sometimes it's really not that important. And I truly suspect it will become less important over my students' adult lives.

After all, who is going to teach the next generation about this stuff if my own students, college graduates, many of them education majors or English majors, do not themselves have a firm grasp of writing mechanics...? (I worked with an English major all last year - she took two courses with me, one each semester - trying and trying and trying to get her to understand about run-on sentences and comma splices, but we really made no progress at all - comma splices seemed just fine to her, no matter how often I pointed out that they are not standard written English.)

I think this is a really huge conundrum - and nobody likes to talk about it at the university level. I'm really curious what goes on with all this stuff at the K-12 level. My students are the result of that K-12 system, but of course I don't have any direct knowledge of what kind of classroom experiences they had there. The indirect evidence suggests that whatever work was done on punctuation, spelling and other writing mechanics did not leave a lasting impression.

[Ellen Pham]

You caught me, Laura- I didn't even know Eats, Shoots & Leaves had a tone, I just looked at the pictures while browsing the bookstore :D Though your example is so much more compelling! I will never forget it!

Which reminds me of a really dumb kid's joke that I also will never forget... What letter does poop begin with?

Sorry for that one :D I can't be of much help, but I'll try to write more about what I did to teach the basics (I don't ever remember using the phrase "comma splice") to fourth and fifth graders later tonight... My experience is getting a bit ancient at this point, though. I hope other elementary and high school teachers chime in!

[Mark Pennington]

Laura,

No quick fixes from my end of the Internet. I taught in the reading/writing center at American River College here in Sacramento for three years, so I know the issues. Don't give up. Your students are worth every ounce of your concern and effort.

I do think Ellen has a nice thought on bringing home the ramifications of poor mechanics. We used to teach a Workplace Literacy course at the same community college and our HR connections were helpful in providing the "you'd never get a job here with such poor writing" reality checks. I do hear you about feeling a bit like a "fish out of water," when other professors seem to care less about what is in the pond. Perhaps pushing for common writing standards across curricular areas? I can almost hear you saying, "Yeah, right... that will happen."

Three suggestions... why not give a mechanics and/or grammar/usage diagnostic assessment at the beginning of the course? Give back the results and then provide resources for the students to address their deficits on their own. The work should be compensatory, as they should already be at mastery level. Students can then re-take the assessment as many times as is necessary to demonstrate mastery. But... mastery is required prior to turning in their first paper...or?
ELA/Reading Assessments

Why not assign heterogeneously mixed peer editing groups, based upon the results of the diagnostic, and require the students to red ink them and teach each other prior to turning them into you to grade/comment?

This one can be quite personal, so disregard if it doesn't work for you. I've gone to 100% e-grading with all my comments/corrections made in Microsoft Word®. The comments/corrections do require student revisions. Most of the comments/corrections we make are the same ones over and over again, so I have "programmed in" 87 canned ones that tell what is wrong and why it is wrong. Of course, I add in my own personalized comments, as well. So, there is accountability and a significant time savings. Here are the e-grading canned comments/corrections.

Kudos for caring for your students so much.

[Laura Gibbs]

Hi Mark, I feel very affirmed by your suggestions here, since I actually do all of these already because it is what I have gravitated towards just by groping my way along. I am so glad to have that confirmed by someone who is really at home in the writing field, as you are!

The diagnostic is something new this year; I am really glad I've started collecting some actual data like this at the beginning of the semester, right in the very first week. It was actually easy to do the diagnostic, since our course management system uses "question pools" so I was able to take the questions I had made for the quizzes (about a thousand of them by the time it was all done) and randomly sample from that pool for a diagnostic. What was even more fun was turning those questions into random javascript quizlets that the students can find on the help pages for the topics I addressed - I think they like having the little questions where they get instant feedback, outside of the context of a quiz - here's what I mean -
Who - Whom - Who's - Whose
As you can see, all the quiz content is based on proverbs. That's my attempt to offer something of value even to the students who do well with writing mechanics... the proverbs contain some fun stuff and some wisdom too, completely aside from the punctuation and spelling items. Plus, since I teach folklore and mythology, proverbs are very congenial to the content of the courses.

For the canned comments, I use a GoogleDocument which I keep open in my browser (since I teach online, everything I do is browser-based) - and what I like about that is I can edit it on the fly; the GoogleDoc is editable while I am working on it, but also accessible from any computer, so I am not tethered to my work computer. The document has been evolving over the past seven years that I've been teaching online, so it has become super useful to me; not only does it contain all kinds of grammar stuff, but it also contains my standard little sermons about the content areas of my course, too (Disney films! mermaids! pirates! Karma! Dharma! all kinds of fun stuff)... I love being able to cut and paste the basics and then just customize the comments for each student. I was never able to do that hand-marking papers... not to mention that my handwriting was awful, ha ha.

Peer response: I haven't pushed at the peer response for grammar stuff, since they get so excited about commenting on the content of each other's writing. Sometimes the more confident students will say things about punctuation and spelling in their peer responses, which is great - but many of my students are just not able to provide comments like that, and I don't want to set them a task beyond what they are capable of. Also, since the students are publishing their work as webpages, it really helps to have peer comments about the design - and the students are really good about commenting on design issues and web usability from their perspective as readers/users. I really don't give the students any feedback about web design issues since they are so good at helping each other with that; not that they are very skilled at web design - most of them are just beginners - but they are EXTREMELY interested in web design, so I can rely on their enthusiasm to fuel the peer review process there.

Teaching online makes all of this so much easier - I was curious to read in your blog about the ways you can turn the classroom environment to good use in teaching writing. That would have been so valuable for me when I was still teaching in the classroom. I was completely stumped about how to teach writing when I was in the classroom, but online teaching (which is what I've done for the past 7 years) has allowed that to evolve very naturally. All our interaction online is in writing after all... which has made me much more self-aware as a writer, too, which I appreciate just for myself. If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have told you that I was ambivalent about writing... but this online career has really ignited my interest, which continues to grow - I guess when my interest STOPS growing, I'll know it's time to move on to something else! :-)