Summary 11/28

Lindemann starts her chapter with a discussion on "basics." She and many other people in the writing field believe written exams do not measure a person's writing performance. This failure to measure makes it hard to tell if a person has basic writing skills or not.Cooper and Odel believe that a teacher should diagnose students' writing problems and provide good feedback to the students in order to help them become better writers. Lindemann believes that in order to diagnose students' problems, the student should write two different short papers about two different subjects. This should provide much information about the students' writing skills. But, some problems the student may be able to avoid so the teacher would not know the student is having a problem in that area. After reading a student's paper it is important that the notes that teachers left are useful to the students. This is complicated by the fact that many students see comments on essays has marks of failure and do not look at them to help improve their writing. Also corrections can be made by viewing the paper on a piece by piece basis (atomistic) or has a whole (holistic.) The last part of the chapter deals with the teacher's workload.

According to the "professionals" standardized testing does not work. Especially when it is writing standardized testing. What I do not under stand is, if standardized testing does not work then why would writing for the teacher be any different? Is it the cold nature of having someone you have never seen grade your paper? Or is it due to the weight that people sometimes give to these standardized tests. The idea that Lindemann mentions with the two short writing assignments has failures that even Lindemann agrees exist. But, I guess that it would provide a general idea on where the student is in their writing development. Then the rest of the year should be used to find all the little problems that student has. The cryptic notes that a teacher leaves on a paper also does not help the student has much has a teacher would think. But, the shorthand nature of comments is due to the work load that the teacher would have from their students.

Blog 11/26

After a written assignment, the teacher would usually bloody up a paper with comments and corrections. Some of the comments did help me in my pursuit for a better paper. These useful comments usually helped to correct my mistakes due to misunderstanding of the rules of writing. Especially the comments about a writing style that is new to me. Comments on mistakes with citing work with the different styles stands out. Granted how you cite your work does not affect the message that you are writing. But, what makes comments on this effective is due to the amount of weight teachers and schools give to proper citing. Improper citing can actually cause plagiarism. This type of plagiarism is by accident, but it is still considered plagiarism. And every college student knows what happens when they plagiaries a work. These comments on how we cite our work then are on of the best ways to not have problems down the road when the student would have a teacher that sees plagiarism has a black/white issue with no gray area. Ineffective comments are the comments that only apply to the given situation. These comments are useless in the scope of things. An example of a comment for a given situation is "you used Times instead of Times New Roman." The type of font used does nothing to affect the writing. The comment does nothing to help me become a better writer. All this comment did was to show that there is a difference in Times and Times New Roman. For comments to be effective they must be able to apply to writing in general. In effective comments are those comments that only apply to that one writing assignment.

Blog 11/19

A foreign speaking student poses special challenges that are different then the standard student. Even these students poses different challenges, depending on their understanding of the English language. A child that has no understanding of English, will be hard to communicate with. Also, they would not know the words needed for written communication. A student that understands the English words may still have problems with slang, or literary devices like puns, and hyperboles. The students that have spent most of their lives learning English would probably not be too different from other students, with the exception of universal problems for the foreign students. All the foreign students will have to face certain problems. The other students in the class maybe racist towards what ever creed the foreign student is. This will cause problems for the student that may or may not affect the student's work. The reverse of this is also true. Considering that much of the world is considered "Third World," and much of third world's people are of the peasant class, and are overall in worse shape then the poor of the United States. With this bad background and enough of them in on area, a gang can form. This occurs repeatedly examples being- Irish, Italians, Mexicans, and many other large groups of foreign born have produce gangs. Although gangs of any race can pose problems for students.

Summary 11/14

Teaching about rewriting is the name of this game. Lindeman says about how rewriting is a percived form punishment for writing a bad paper. The students are ether lazy, unsure, or beleive it tis the teacher's job to rewrite. The lazy part is self explanatory, but the unsure means that the student is not confident enough to make the paper better. The students see rewriting has a separate process than has a step IN the process. Also considering the abundance of work for the student rewriting is normally not stressed. Lindeman also went deep into the their own process of rewriting the one paragraph in the opening of the chapter. Lindeman also said about the styles of peer review. Another problem with writing Lindeman points out is inferior assignments. "Lard" is also talked about and how it loses the meaning of the sentence. Lindeman also proposes workshops has way to help the students to learn to rewrite properly. To help reinforce rewriting the idea of the students developing their own guidelines is proposed. The teacher is expected to nudge the student in the direction of general guidelines, but the teachers do not tell the students the guidelines.

Teachers never really taught rewriting. They just did rewriting. This means they would bloody up your paper; and tell you go away and fix. So, yes I believe students see rewriting has a form of punishment. I also experienced rewriting has a separate process. In that: you edit, turn in the paper, get a grade, and then rewrite it does seem like two different events. Also during school we would only rewrite major papers and not the smaller less important papers. The less important papers that deal with a stupid subject. For the peer review what Lindeman propose would work in a perfect little world where more that one student knows whats going on. For the whole "lard" section, Lindeman failed to mention the whole word count/ page length requirements. Workshops are fine but they lack the regularity of a class. Has for the student generated guideline, if they have no good solid experience with writing then coming up with their own guidelines maybe tough.

Blog 11/12

I did my heaviest revision on the final for a class that we wrote five other papers for. I did the most at the end for two reasons. One it was the last paper I did in the class and I prefer to have my papers get progressively better. So, to make a better paper I did revisions. Also the final carried a good amount of weight in the class. So, makes sense to be careful on something with so much weight. This along with my first paper being not the best I can do due to it being an in class essay.Thoughts of this made me want to show that I can do better when I can use a computer. I wrote the paper in my usual fashion, editing has I go. When finished I looked over and corrected on the screen without printing the paper out. I read it over to make sure I wrote what I meant to, and it all made sense. My usual corrections being grammatical. There were few sentences that required real work. Meaning that I only change a few words without rewriting the entire sentence. I would also use synonyms on words that were repeated. I also rechecked the style used for citing my sources. Do not need accidental plagiarism because I miss citied a source. The revision was not the most harsh but the essay was for a non-English class. These means that the professor was more interested in what was said and not how it was said.

Summary 11/07

Most students when they begin writing, write like their first draft is their final draft. The students get caught up correcting what they write, disrupting the flow of ideas. In this mind frame to Erika Lindemann believes the first lesson that should be taught to students is that words can change. This means that after a word is written down, it can be erased and changed in to another word during revising. This is to have students get away from their current writing style. The second lesson from Lindemann is that words cannot stand alone. Words rely on the other words around them to make sense. Last Lindenmann believes that writers need to capitalize on what they already know. Normally in schools students learn parts of speech by memorizing certain information. This takes away from the importance that each word plays in a sentence. Lindenmann also has a quick lesson in passive/active voice. Important information being that if the verb following the "be" verbs(is/am/was/were/being/been) has -ing the statement is active. A -ed, -en ending on the following verb means passive. Style was also covered by Lindenmann. Style to Lindenmann means words that give ideas clarity, emphasis, specificity, and variety. Meaning that style is apart of the work.

Style to most college students means MLA, APA, or the like. Style to us is the format that we use to enter information in a essay format. To Lindenmann style is actually something we choose. Style to Lindenmann is actually important to the way we give information. As for the parts of the speech, yes I remember some of the words but do not know what they mean. I do not even know what they do in some cases like Past Participial Phrase. But, I know that I use these different parts of speech, but I do not know exactly what they do or are called. But, the section on passive/active voice was good. I did not even know how to find if a voice is active or passive. I think that some of this problem comes from me learning this information in elementary or middle school and only remembering it for the test that had nothing to do with life. The idea for teaching kids that words can change is nice, but the second part of words being dependent on one another sort of makes the first claim about words changing weaker. If words rely on other words then changing one will affect the other words, causing problems.