As a homeschool mom you know that children who learn to write well will do better in college and even in life. Yet it is hard to know the difference between a dangling participle and a sentence fragment. How are we supposed to be able to grade their work or tell them how to write better beyond spelling errors?
Even professional writers such as myself struggle with editing our own work. Then to teach that to my boys has just led to arguments and cries of “But I want to be original, Mom!” My oldest hates to remember what to capitalize, what not to, and when.
I tease Logan that there can only be one ee cummings.
Thankfully, I don’t have to be the mean guy. There are three free online editor programs that will tell the boys when they need to fix what they wrote. It also helps me to be an even more awesome writer than I already am! These programs can remember all the spelling and grammar rules. They also do word choice analysis as well as other important editing tasks.
The Three On-line Editing Programs are Grammarly, Hemingway app, Grammarly, and PaperRater. Some of these apps do some things better than others and some of them are easier to understand than others. It just all depends on which one you feel thinks like you do. I do all three and in that order for all my writing and to grade the
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I like that it shows the grade level of the writing. The best blog posts are about a grade 5. That means it is easier to read through fast. People don’t have time to get into heavy-duty reading when these days. This app does not need any download. While you can write in it I find it easier to paste in already written text. It highlights sentences that are hard to read, adverbs, and use of passive voice as you type. Then you rewrite the highlighted areas until they are no longer highlighted. Doing this has forced me to make my writing tighter and more to the point. This video shows what it looks like and how it
However, these techniques that I fostered as a child proved lacking when I entered middle school. It turns out that in comparison to my previous writing, I was no longer writing for my own self-improvement or joy; I was now writing to please someone who was grading the work. After many dissatisfying remarks about my writing, the self-conscious feelings I had as a child crept up on me once again. I felt the need to impress and be perfect. For every paper I wrote from then on, there was that little voice in the back of my head telling me that I had to try twice as hard because English was my second language. For a very long time, I was not able to write a paper without scrutinizing it harshly. “The oppressor,” as Anne Lammot states in “Bird by Bird,” kept me from what I truly wanted to write and made me focus on the unattainable goal of being perfect. Perfection is something that “… limit[s] us…[and] keep[s] us from experiencing life” (Lammott 30). The purpose was not to write for me, but for others, and that was my flaw; I was just writing to please. Technicality was my only worry and I did not worry if what I was writing actually had
What I use to start my paper is what I use when I finish my paper. I use Microsoft Word as my main source of writing my drafts. My secondary method is writing done interesting facts and statements I found during my research that I want to come back to when I am typing the rough draft. I find that writing important things down helps with my time efficiency and keeps me more focused on my research, instead of copy, pasting, and switching screens each time. I believe writing a rough draft with our advancement of technology a waste of time for me, and I choose to use Word for my drafts. It is neatly presented for proofreading. My handwriting is not the best, and I feel that it is easier to read off of a computer screen than reading messy handwriting. Not to mention that Word does a large amount of proofreading for you. Today, everyone is so used to reading off of a computer screen that it has become natural, but depending on who can proofread my paper, it can be right on the screen or from a hard copy. I do believe I work more efficient typing than any other method I used in the past.
This is called "getting rid of the clutter" and helps free your mind of all the junk that goes on in a given day so that your brain can focus on the task at hand - writing.
College writing professors teach writing in a variety of ways around the United States and the world. The reason for this is that some professors are trying to teach their students a different aspect of writing an essay or a paper. Two views on this particular subject that I found interesting were Maxine Hairston’s essay "Diversity, Ideology, and Teaching Writing" and also Thomas Bray’s newspaper article "Memorial Day and Multiculturalism". These essays are two totally different views on how diversity and multiculturalism is to be applied in America or taught in the college writing classroom.
“Editing allows me to collaborate with people whose talents make up for my weaknesses.” Reading Hugo Lindgren’s article “Be Wrong as Fast as You Can”, this quote stuck out to me more than any other. Last year I began writing for the Crimson White newspaper, and after almost 40 articles I began to realize that I had found a rhythm to writing and began to think that I was pretty good. However, this past summer I spent some time as a copy editor and realized very quickly where my weaknesses were. Being able to edit other people’s work really connected me as a writer to others who were far better than I was. As journalism students we spend so much time reading news, and through doing that we learn so much through other’s style. On the other hand, it was not until I began editing other people’s work that I realized how much I had to learn.
Not just any random online resources, I used the ones that involved punctuation errors in essay’s. The best thing about using these online resources was, I didn’t have to pay to use it and it was easy to use and very helpful. All I had to do was copy my essay and put it in a text box, and the program had done the rest of the work. After I had put my essay in the text box I click enter, and the program calculated all my punctuation errors I had on my paper. When the program calculated my punctuation errors, it had gave me the correct punctuation that was needed for the text. Then all I had to do was click the correct punctuation and it put it in the essay. I never knew correcting punctuation is no longer than five minutes with just a click of a mouse and a helpful
Now that you 've got finished writing, it 's time to take a look at it again to be sure the essay do not contain spelling errors and grammatical mistakes. It is preferable to show your essay out to someone or get it proofread by one of your English school teachers or friends you can trust.
This contributes to Pinker’s idea that the English language is failing. First, children lack the self-esteem to write a solid paper and from there, will not ask for the help they need. Lee Warren states in his paper, “The biggest factor affecting learning for lower class students is a lack of confidence based on real or perceived weaknesses in preparation” (Warren). Simply because a child is not from the highest class and they are intertwined with these high class students they feel they cannot learn as well and that shows in their work. This should not be a factor and this is where teachers need to step in with their set fundamental rules that all children should face when writing. Teachers need to apply the fundamental rules as well as ensure every child in each class feels equal and like they are capable of being a proper writer. Pinker tries to say “[that] once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous” (Pinker 374). This is completely false. What needs to happen is teaching authorities needs to step in and fix the problems by starting with young children and following through until they are done school following with a repetition of this for all
When it comes to writing in any English Class, I had to learn and remember that my style of writing matters in anything I do. It sometimes makes me overthink my writing in general on what I am writing about. You think you remember grammar and the style of writing in elementary through high school, but when you enter college life you are getting more in depth into writing. It sometimes troubled me on when and where you should have commas and a little bit with transitions. Writing was my favorite subject in elementary school, but when I entered college my Freshmen year it thrown me off a bit, but I think as I got more into writing it help me out a whole lot more. I hoping the changes that I make to my writing is writing more often, read through
This semester was my very first semester as a college student. Being the first, it was probably the semester I would learn the most in. I learned the expectations for writing that I will have to live up to for the next four years of my college career. Though my high school teachers were usually demanding because I was in the Honors English section throughout high school, writing in college has still ?raised the bar? for me. Also, in high school, we would have weeks to pick a topic, create a thesis, outline the paper, write the paper, and then revise the paper. In college, the time restraints are not quite as lenient. I?ve had to learn to manage my time and be more productive with what free moments I have. Strangely enough, I?ve found the college English experience to be much more rewarding and enjoyable than in high school.
One of the most prominent forms of writing in children’s lives is essay writing and writing for school. These skills become important later on in life when these children grow up to become adults and the reports that are written are for something far more important than a mark. Past generations were limited to where they can go to have a piece of literature edited. The furthest their resources could expand would have been teachers, or anyone who was willing to edit. Today’s generation has the technology that allows them to seek help from someone who may have problems in their own writing. Computers are the first major improvement to editing. They catch initial and obvious mistakes that would otherwise go unnoticed because a person is so used to their own writing. There are many websites that help students learn how to cite the information. An example of this is Owl Perdue; it teaches people how to cite information for essays, reports. It teaches someone how to cite information from online sources, books, journals, etc. There are also many websites where students who want to learn what grammatical mistakes they make can point out what some of their downfalls are. This allows students (or anyone who wants some of their literary work edited) to learn from their mistakes. Future literary pieces will become easier to enjoy and
Owston, R. D, Murphy, S, & Wideman, H. H, (1992). [pdf]. The Effect of Word Processing on Students’ Writing Quality and Revision Strategies. Research in the teaching of English, 26(3). Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/40171308
A College has a large number of learning skills that can be used for success of each student. As an A student, I am familiar with using A’s educational resources. A few of the resources are extremely handy and adaptable in the application that a student needs. One of the resource tools that I have found most beneficial in my learning process is the A Center for Writing Excellence (CWE). The Center for Writing Excellence offers a plagiarism and grammar checker. Here, I can submit my writing materials to have them checked for plagiarism and grammar errors. I also used the grammar guide frequently. I believe that one of my biggest faults in writing is grammatical errors. The Center for Writing Excellence also offers example papers, essay development, tutorials guides and writing manuals. There are also other resources such as, Axcess Course Materials, Course Syllabus, Student Workshops, and Visual and Audio Tutorials. These tools can be found at ecampus for A College.
In regards to Language Arts education, the prominence of word processors has helped to ease the work of editing and rewriting. Built in spelling ...
Roblyer and Doering (2010) acknowledge that even though “...word processing has become the most commonly used software in education” research on the benefits of its use in the classroom shows controversial findings (p.115). This essay will briefly discuss a few obvious benefits of word processing as well as summarize Bangert-Drowns, 1993; Hawisher, 1989; Snyder, 1993 and Goldberg, Russell, and Cook, 2003 research on how word processing affects student’s writing ability. The essay also includes a personal reflection the how word processing tools benefit students. In the end, however, it is up to the readers to determine if the use of word processing tools in the classroom is a beneficial for student growth in writing.