It was officially midterm week in my U.S. History class last week. My exams – at least for the larger introductory courses – typically have two components: an in-class multiple-choice portion and a take-home primary source analysis paper. One of my goals in the survey course is to manage the flow of information from reading, lecture, and discussion to my students. Abiding by the axiom “less is more,” I use quizzes to motivate my students to read carefully and the in-class midterm to hold them accountable for class attendance and participation.
In some ways, however, the paper is the most informative and revealing assessment of the semester. The assignment requires students to analyze one of the myriad of primary sources we analyze over the course of the semester using the historical method. The assignment thus requires students to integrate a broader knowledge of history into interpretations of specific primary sources. I find that many of my students relish the opportunity to complete a more interpretive and subjective assignment than a quiz or an exam. For this reason, even though their first paper counts as an ungraded, rough draft, most of my students make a fair and honest attempt to analyze their sources and develop original and unique interpretations of them.
The biggest issue with these papers, however, has to do with the writing itself. I’ve discovered that many of my students’ papers do not exhibit proper writing mechanics and contain repeated grammatical errors of varying degrees. This presents a challenge: how does one grade a paper with unique – but not clearly expressed – ideas? In an effort to make my students aware of their own writing flaws and to hold them accountable for fixing them, I have added a grammar component to my essay rubric that lets students know what grammatical mistakes they make (verb tense, noun-pronoun agreement, homonyms, and more) and whether they should submit a draft of their next paper to me or the college’s writing workshop (I check “yes” most of the time).
In class today, I handed back my students’ papers and reviewed this section of the rubric. We went over the papers’ most common grammatical mistakes (comma vs. period usage, verb tense, incorrect noun-pronoun agreement, the use of “etc.”). I presented my students with two sentences – one with correct grammar and one with incorrect grammar. To my surprise, the vast majority of my students thought that that it was correct to use a comma when the sentence required a period and believed that the word “U.S.” required a “they” pronoun (not “it”). The activity, originally designed to take 10 minutes, took 25 and garnered substantial follow-up questions about grammatical rules and usage. It was an eye-opening experience that suggested many of my students had rarely (at least not recently) been through this type of structured writing workshop. In all, the activity left me convinced that I need to devote more class time to writing.
Of course, such a focus opens up several pedagogical questions, namely how professors can teach writing in a way that integrates skill development with course content. I’ve grappled with these questions lately (in a development not entirely unrelated to my own recent editing of my dissertation and various job application documents) and settled on this new, short-term step. But I am eager to hear if others have utilized similar or different strategies. The more papers I read, the more it becomes apparent that I need to take a more hands-on approach to writing skills.
