Really?

Will Baude points to Daniel Drezner's writing guide and wonders, with some puzzlement, about where to find all the professors who "say that the only important thing in a paper is the ideas, and therefore typos, grammatically incorrect sentences, or sloppy style are irrelevant" (Drezner #6). I didn't meet any at the University of Chicago. I have met quite a few professors who rarely, if ever, mark the grammatical errors, which understandably leads students to presume that their errors don't "count." (I'm not one of those professors.) Some non-English professors have told me that it's "not their job" to teach writing skills per se, which has always struck me as self-defeating, not to mention likely to result in frustration-induced ulcers. Perhaps these are the people that Drezner means.

Comments

[Timothy Burke]

I do not consistently mark grammar or spelling throughout a paper, nor do I formally mark down for it (e.g., 5 mistakes = one letter grade down). But I do tell students that a paper which is sloppy enough in its language, form, spelling or anything else that it is poorly communicative will get a grade commensurate with its low quality. Swarthmore students being what they are, I don't see too many papers in that ballpark. Were I elsewhere, I'm sure that I would.

[Ruth]

Marking mistakes takes time; actually correcting them (as opposed to merely circling them) takes way more time. And then there's always the question of whether students pay attention: unless you're going to sit down with them afterwards and say, "why did I circle this? What's the problem?" most -- the vast majority, I'd guess -- simply won't think about what the marks mean. I've had students revise essays for me multiple times, making the same mistakes over and over, until I finally discover that they didn't understand my notations (such as the standard sideways S marking indicating that two characters or words need to be inverted). And they never thought to ask me what I meant!

That said, I mark mistakes, and I grade down for them. And when I've taught non-English classes (Women's Studies), I've been criticized by students in other majors for making them adhere to "MLA" standards when Psych, say, has different rules.