Group/Individual Help

The Professor was better today. She handed the classes Final Paper Number Two back to them with comments and marks - lots of marks. Most of the marks were typical proofreading marks, but she introduced two new marks that she wanted students to work with. The marks were placed along the left margin of particular lines - a check if the Professor found a particular point to be exceptionally strong, and a dash if the Professor found some sort of error - usually grammatical.

Students were to look over their papers and notice the checks and dashes. They then got in groups of two and attempted to figure out why the dashes were in place. While this was going on, the Professor and I milled about making sure groups were on task as well as making sure that students were correcting and finding the proper issues denoted by the dashes. Inevitably, some students had more marks than others. Some students found themselves attempting to fix every other line of their paper, while others found themselves searching for dashes to correct.

The most common mistakes I saw surrounded the inclusion of quotes. Many students failed to properly introduce a quote and ended up with redundant statements that needed to be fixed. Others simply dropped the quote in the paper with out any sort of introduction, or synthesis of the quote. The Professor and I have discussed these issues before, and some of the students are getting it; others are not. Another huge problem with quotes was citation. Now, I am no APA pro. I spent most of my college days using Chicago, or MLA, and consequently I do not know the finer points of APA by heart. However, I do know how to properly cite a quote. I have a general rule, and it may not always be correct, but it is ninety-five percent of the time. If you can't figure out what to include in your parenthesis look at your works cited. What belongs in the parenthesis is probably the first thing you see in the citation for that article. One thing I saw a lot of, and I'm not incredibly sure where students learned it or why they are doing it, but they have been inserting complete url's as a citation. Not okay.

Another big problem that seemed to be found in over half the papers was students using the forbidden comma splice, or using incomplete sentences - sentence fragments. Apparently my lesson on the comma splice didn't strike the hearts of all of them.