Teacher Resources: Things That Work

WORKING ON PATTERNS OF ERROR
by Richard E. Miller

Responding to Student Writing: 
Identifying a Pattern of Error and 
Setting an Schedule for Improvement

I find myself working with a lot of struggling ESL students this semester in my section of 101. These students tend to face a double challenge in the course: they must learn the form of the essay and they must work on improving their command of the conventions of written English. To assist such students in passing the course, I aim to provide an end comment that both engages with the conceptual work in the student writing and that identifies the individual pattern of error that marks that writing. 

Below you will find a couple of examples of how I approach this task. 

  The first comment is in response to a rough draft for the first assignment, for a student who was struggling both with the organization of his essay and with surface-level problems. Here, I identify a set of surface-level problems for the student to resolve in the final draft.

  The second comment is in response to this same student's revision of the first assignment. Here, the student has demonstrated that he was able to correct one kind of error (subject-verb agreement), but not another. The revision, in other words, helps to set a clear agenda for what grammatical and syntactical issues we must focus on in the weeks to come.

  The third comment is in response to a student who successfully engaged with the assignment, but failed to produce prose that was "relatively error-free." Here, I've requested that the student correct only the lines in his essay where I've indicated there's been the omission of an article. Once the student demonstrates the ability to correct such errors, he will receive a passing grade.

While the identification of these patterns of error does take some time initially, this time is made up quickly by those who generate their comments on the computer, since the bulleted passages in the comments contain boilerplate material about the most common error patterns (those Rei Noguchi has identified as "fatal") that surface in writing of beginning students.

Comment on Rough Draft #1, from an engaged student with sentence-level problems

Dear Student A,
I'm impressed by the effort you've made here to work with Drucker's entire essay. By setting yourself such a high goal, you've forced yourself to make connections between Drucker's concern with the mobile knowledge worker, the mobility of knowledge itself, the function of schooling, and the question of who is to care for the common good. You're obviously still working out what these connections may be, but it's encouraging to see that you've got so many of the essential pieces of Drucker's argument into your first draft.
As you go to revise, you will want to focus on the following:

  You need to find the central concern of your paper and organize your paragraphs in such a way that they build on this central concern. In this draft, one paragraph follows another, but they don't seem to be "in conversation" with one another. That is, they just seem piled on top of one another. Your title offers one way to center your writing: if you are concerned with showing what the connection is between mobility and prosperity (and this seems like a very good place to start to me), then write a paper that shows, step by step, what the relationship between mobility and prosperity is for Drucker. To do this work well will involve more than just shifting around the paragraphs that you have; you will have to do additional writing and additional reading to generate the connections that will help your paper hold together.

  We will need to spend the semester working on the problems that you are encountering as a result of writing in your second language. This will be a tall order but I think that, if we start right now, there's a good chance we'll be able to get you to the point where you reach that standard of being able to produce "relatively error-free prose" that is necessary to pass the course. We won't tackle every difficulty that you are having at the same time. We will start, instead, with two of the main difficulties you are having to begin with and, once you've addressed these difficulties, we'll move on to the next set.  So, in your final draft, I would like you to pay particular attention to the subjects and the verbs in each of your sentences and I would like you to pay attention, as well, to where your sentences begin and end.

  Subjects and verbs: In this draft, you have produced many sentences where the subject of the sentence and the main verb in the sentence do not agree; you also produce many sentences where they do agree. By taking your time to review your subjects and verbs in your final draft, you'll provide me with a paper that makes it clearer to me which problems are the result of carelessness and which are the result of uncertainty about the rules governing subjects and verbs.

  Sentence boundaries: In this draft, you've produced a number of sentence fragments and run-on sentences. Again, in your final draft, I'd like you to pay particular attention to where you are beginning and ending your sentences. By taking your time to review your sentence boundaries in your final draft, you'll provide me with a paper that makes it clearer to me which problems are the result of carelessness and which are the result of uncertainty about the rules governing what makes a complete sentence.

Comment on Final Draft, Paper #1, for the same student

"Not Only Prosperity"
February 8, 2000

Dear Student A, 

Of all the students in this class, you've done the best job looking at the knowledge society's downside. As you discuss here, the mobility of the knowledge worker has served to disrupt the traditional family, creating in its place individuals who feel a greater connection to their commodities than they do to their fellow citizens or their own offspring. You write with great gusto about these issues, bringing in outside material to assist you in filling out your picture of what life in like in the knowledge society. Conceptually you're on the right track; with regards to grammatical correctness, though, you're going to need to pay particular attention to where you begin and end your sentences. I'll discuss the issues in order.

As you go to work on your next paper, you'll want to consider the degree to which the social problems you point to here can be attributed to the rise of the knowledge worker. For example, you cite Weber on the effects of industrialization, but the passage you cite seems to suggest that the disruption of the social sector began long before the knowledge worker appeared on the scene. You will need to think, too, about the rising divorce rates that you cite on page 4: how are we to know that the rise in divorce rates is attributable to the emergence of the knowledge worker? And, if these problems are attributable to the rise of the knowledge worker, how do you think Drucker would respond to your assessment? Would he agree that, as you say, "on the whole the negatives outweigh the positives"?

Once you get control of your sentence boundaries, you'll be in a position to produce passing work. The subject-verb problems that were present in your rough draft have vanished in this draft, but the sentence boundary problems remain. Please read the following sections of EasyWriter: "Comma Splices and Fused Sentences" and "Sentence Fragments," pp 32-37 and the attached section on sentence fragments. (I'm also attaching a form for signing up at the Writing Center, where you can work with a tutor on these issues.) These readings will provide you with some strategies for identifying and correcting the problems you are having producing well-formed sentences. For the time being, I would also like to ask you to refrain from using the semi-colon and the hyphen: these forms of punctuation are compounding the problems you are having. Once we reach the point where the majority of the sentences in your essays are well-formed, we'll reintroduce the colon, the semi-colon, and the hyphen to your writing.

NP+ Comment on Final Draft, Paper #1, for student who has successfully engaged with the assignment but who has failed to produce "relatively error-free prose"

"The New Society of Knowledge"
February 8, 2000

Dear Student B,

This is an excellent first paper. You've restructured your argument and you've developed your discussion of the shortcomings of the knowledge society, producing a paper that demonstrates your command of Drucker's argument and your sense of what work lies ahead for an evolving society that has no sense of community. I will look forward to seeing how your argument develops once you bring Barber into the conversation. That is, I'll be looking to see if you think that his suggestions about how to create a civil society will work in the world you've described in your essay.

Your grade has been pulled down by the ongoing difficulties that you are having with the use of articles. You've done a pretty good job tackling the subject-verb problems: I've marked lines containing such errors with an X in the left-hand margin and, as you'll see, there are not a lot of lines so marked. I've marked lines where articles have been omitted with an  . What I would like you to do is refer to the discussion of articles in EasyWriter pp. 65-66. Once you've read this section, I would like you to attempt to correct the errors in the lines marked with an  . Please make your corrections in pencil on this draft and hand in your corrections to me next class. We will then make an appointment to go over your corrections and to discuss those lines that gave you the most trouble. When you have successfully completed the process of correcting your work, you will receive a B for this paper. (Your recorded grade will remain an NP until then.)