It happens

As we head into midterm break, I continue to fight the good fight against the armies of grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities:

1) "It" with no antecedent.  "By studying grammar, it helps students improve their writing."  It what?
2) The dreaded semi-colon.  The semi-colon is such a nice punctuation mark.  Just not when it's used to introduce a quotation.
3) "The poem states..." It.  Does.  Not. (I know--we've been here before.  We're still here.) 
4) ( ), instead of ,( ).  It doesn't help that the latter arrangement was acceptable in the nineteenth century. 
5) "These characters/poems/novels have many similarities and many differences."  Arrrrrrggggh! *self-defenestrates*
6) "In line 12..." Shouldn't that information be in the parenthetical citation? What's it doing in the tag?
7) "Easy."  Is not. 
8)  "He attempts to say..." But if he said it, then surely he wasn't just attempting to do so?
9) "This" with no antecedent.  One of my professors once threatened me with capital punishment for making this error...
10) Apostrophes, or the lack thereof.  Where have they all gone?

Comments

[Rebecca]

I'm still on its/it's, their/there/they're, your/you're. I would be relieved if I could proceed to the proper use of the semicolon.

[Scott Eric Kaufman]

The cause of your defenestration is the dreaded compare/contrast essay. While there's nothing I can do to prevent students from reproducing said formula, I can at least present the following "Top Ten" list. (This comes from here. I'd indicate where "here" is, but then you'd think less of me. Needless to say, the combination of wit and the utterly trivial in that thread stays with me to this day. [You may have to scroll down some to reach it.] Hence, the following.)

Top Ten Sesame Street Characters, Defenestrations, And Frank Stallone Songs:

10. Love Is Like A Light

9. Guy Smiley

8. The first defenestration of Prague

7. Runnin'

6. Don Music

5. Axel Foley in Beverly Hills Cop

4. Jan Masaryk's death in 1948

3. Far From Over

2. Roosevelt Franklin

1. The second defenestration of Prague

Since I'm being silly, here are some more of my favorite "Top Ten Threes":

Chinese Resturants in Ohio, John Lennon Albums, Names of Ralph Lauren Paint Colors

10. Bamboo Garden
9. Double Fantasy
8. Water Lily
7. Blue Gibbon
6. Two Virgins
5. Blue Iris
4. Double Dragon
3. Milk and Honey
2. Rose Garden
1. Golden Jade

Top Ten Jewish Gangsters, Defunct Automobiles, and Tiny Countries:

10. Little Augie
9. Andorra
8. Gremlin
7. Liechtenstein
6. Gyp the Blood
5. San Marino
4. Edsel
3. Luxembourg
2. Stanley Steamer
1. Monk Eastman

Top 10 early Peter Gabriel solo albums, early Led Zeppelin albums, and Star Wars Episodes:

10. III
9. IV
8. II
7. II
6. IV
5. I
4. Security
3. III
2. VI
1. I

You see why this is addictive, no? (Alright, I'll go be random elsewhere.)

[Casey]

Also, I find use of the word "very" quite annoying.

[Bourgeois Nerd]

I'm not getting what you mean in #4. And as for #6, isn't it acceptable to use some citation info in the tag and then put the rest at the end? I was always taught you could do "As Smith says, 'blah blah blah!' (297)." instead of "As Smith says, 'blah, blah, blah!' (Smith 297)."

[overread]

I've found your apostrophes. They've all gone to handmade signs around where I live

"Apple's! 99 cent's each"

"We've got 'new' movies!"

and on and on...

[Teaching Assistant X]

I know that we're supposed to keep an eye on these things, but to me the more important thing is to get students thinking about writing. Close reading is my mantra in my discussion sections. I try to get students to "heighten their sensitivity to structures of verbal representation" (and yes, I put it to them that way). My suggestion is that students will write better when they learn to read better. I've stopped marking "grammatical errors and stylistic infelicities" in student writing because I think it's the easy route that a lot of graders take. There's just no way around it: grammatical errors just aren't errors. Grammar doesn't follow any logical pattern, and bad grammar doesn't indicate sloppiness or even lax thinking. What bad grammar indicates to me is poor methods of teaching it. The least effective way to teach it, in my opinion, is to give students a bunch of arbitrary markings on a paper, not only because it's alienating for students to look at their own text disfigured by an authority figure, but also because it's a lesson without a goal. I've found that the best way to teach good grammar is to use the texts they're already reading. I integrate grammar lessons in everything I teach, but not grammar lessons as such. Instead, we use close reading examples to think through the implications of a comma, a colon, a semi-colon, articles, pronouns, verbs, adverbs, adjectives, etc. Finally, I want to say that my pet peeve is people who get bent out of shape at undergraduates with bad grammar (and worse, bad style). It's not like we weren't all undergraduates at one point, making the same damn mistakes and being bullied by those who "know better." (BTW, you used 'than' instead of 'then'. Of how much value is this lesson?) Didn't we all learn about English grammar through our classes in French anyway?

[Josh]

Do you have students who insist upon spelling "definitely" as "defiantly"?

[Miriam]

#4: There should never be a comma in front of parentheses. Unfortunately for all concerned, nineteenth-century commas do come in front of parentheses...

[What Now?]

My corollary to #8 is the word "seems," as in, "This character seems to say blah, blah, blah." To which I always ask, "And did he not in fact say it? Otherwise, why the 'seems'?"

And, with all due respect to Teaching Assistant X, I think that the above example indicates that grammatical or word-choice problems are often about problems in thinking, and that one of the things that we do when working with students on their grammar is helping them to think about language more exactly.

[Michelle]

I've always been very annoyed with people who mix up their possessives and demonstratives: "Your nice. Your quite funny." How hard is it to remember that "You're" is a contraction of "You are"?

[dave]

I'm grading right now! My favorite so far is - "All the villagers were killed. The survivors moved on to other villages." HA!

[Adjunct Kait]

I love it when people refer to a quote from one source and then because of that quote, they conclude with something like "It is obvious..."
I also have some lovely people who try to say that there are no sources available to contradict their argument. Well, maybe there aren't any sources available full-text on Google, but...

[Adam Roberts]

Talking of nineteenth-century usage, where do you stand on plural genitives? Is it "Chambers'" or "Chambers's"?

I'm generally forgiving of grammatical solecisms. It's errors of fact that wind me up, particular when they lead me to believe that the student has done no more than hastily glance at the blurb on the back of the book. My favourite (in my career so far) was an essay on Old Curiosity Shop that referred several times to the character Little Neil.

[Natalie Bennett]

Dont' work for a newspaper! I spend lots of time wrenching my hair out over stories that start: "It was ..."

But what is IT? How is the reader supposed to know?

Sadly, I don't even always win the argument, so the readers are left in the dark - sometimes for a sentence or more.

[Bob]

I believe you wrote the opposite of what you mean in #4.

[Mano]

What she means in #4 is that it should be the first instead of the second, not that she gets annoyed when she sees the first instead of the second. I can see how it could be understood the opposite way.

[Bob]

I know that's what she meant. But she began the other entries with the error, not the correct form. And therefore ....

[Laura]

Adam, Little Neil reminds me of the essay I received not so long ago that was all about Manvolio. You know, Manvolio - the cross-gartered one from The Chippendales.

[Adam Roberts]

Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have baby oil thrust upon them by whooping crowds of women ...

If we're swapping these stories, I could talk about the essay I received at the end of a course on Gothic fiction (that's at the end, which is to say, after the indvidual had benefitted as fully as they were going to from my wisdom imparted on matters Gothic); and essay which discussed Walpole's The Castle of Toronto. Canada, you see: an intrinsically Gothic place.