During my internship, I've noticed some common issues that my students are having in regards to their writing and I thought it would be interesting to see if anyone else's students are having the same problems.
I think one of the biggest issues that some of my kids has is their tendency to never end a sentence; they just keeping going on and on. It's like the drive-thru scene of "Dude, Where's My Car?" Now, naturally this follows their thought process of, 'this happened, and then this, and then this,' but it's still very annoying to read through. I've tried helping these kids by suggesting that they break up these page-long sentences into separate sentences, but many of them seem to have trouble grasping that concept.
Another big issue that they seem to have is proper pronoun usage. There are a lot of he's and she's, but not very many names to accompany them. This is a simple fix, of course, but it's fascinating to see so many students forget to associate their antecedents with their respective pronoun.
An honorary mention would be the use of commas, although this is a tricky area that even many undergraduate students have trouble with. To many of my students, they know what a comma is and that they have to use it, but they don't really know when it is appropriate to do so. As a result, they end up 'sprinkling' commas wherever they feel like they look best, just trying to get them on the page. My supervising teacher and I don't take off points for improper comma use, but I try to explain to them the best times to use commas ("say the sentence out loud, and whenever there is a pause in speech, that's where you would put a comma in the sentence).
These are things I've noticed my students having trouble with. Is anyone else having the same issues?
I think one of the biggest issues that some of my kids has is their tendency to never end a sentence; they just keeping going on and on. It's like the drive-thru scene of "Dude, Where's My Car?" Now, naturally this follows their thought process of, 'this happened, and then this, and then this,' but it's still very annoying to read through. I've tried helping these kids by suggesting that they break up these page-long sentences into separate sentences, but many of them seem to have trouble grasping that concept.
Another big issue that they seem to have is proper pronoun usage. There are a lot of he's and she's, but not very many names to accompany them. This is a simple fix, of course, but it's fascinating to see so many students forget to associate their antecedents with their respective pronoun.
An honorary mention would be the use of commas, although this is a tricky area that even many undergraduate students have trouble with. To many of my students, they know what a comma is and that they have to use it, but they don't really know when it is appropriate to do so. As a result, they end up 'sprinkling' commas wherever they feel like they look best, just trying to get them on the page. My supervising teacher and I don't take off points for improper comma use, but I try to explain to them the best times to use commas ("say the sentence out loud, and whenever there is a pause in speech, that's where you would put a comma in the sentence).
These are things I've noticed my students having trouble with. Is anyone else having the same issues?