The Perks of Grading English Papers

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I think Taylor Mali puts the experience of being an English teacher best. Spell check was a great invention, but, as seen here, there are downfalls, especially when it comes to ignorance and being hurried.
One of the downfalls of teaching English is the great number of papers I have to grade. While I want my students to write as much as possible, I need to be careful about how much writing I assign that I actually want to grade. Grading writing takes time and patience. Over the past couple of years, I've been developing my own personal list of the most humorous and commonly seen mistakes. I think every English teacher should do this. It would make a great book! Following are some of my favorites. I know some may seem only funny to me, in the midst of grading 90 or so papers, one does start to nerd-out!

1. "We R positive that the invasion of Iraq was prompted by false information provided by the Bush Administration." Like spell check, texting is a cool invention, but the texting language has crossed over into academic writing and I'm just not ready to accept it yet. Are will always be spelled are.

2. "sarah widdop" I often wonder if this is a carry-over from texting (I don't text). Since when were proper nouns not capitalized? You'd think that they'd be able to capitalize their own names!

3. "So like you know when Stalin killed like thousands of people only to create a like industrialized country?" There are words that just don't belong in our writing, let alone our speaking! I'm not even sure what part of speech like would be as used in this sentence, it used to be a verb. Like is often replaced with "you know, kinda, sorta, well, of course."

4. "The book (or chapter or even worse 'it') says 'We don't want to go on the boat." Since when did books talk?

5. "I am doing the history of the Secret Police." Now I have to point out that doing is synonymous having sex and I'm sure that nobody is having sex with history.

6. "When you read the book, you feel as if the author really knew the characters. You wonder where they were when they wrote the book." This can get tricky. Students just don't understand that I didn't read the book, nor are they writing a report about how I felt about the book or author. They're suppose to be writing about how they felt! I often get a double-whammy when the "you" they speak of becomes "u."

7. Thesis statement: "Did you know that rain forests are diminishing every second?" Since when did statements end with question marks?

8. At one point in elementary school, some well-meaning teacher taught his/her students about transitions between sentences. The only ones that ever seem to stick are first, second, third (and somewhere in that process, they became adverbs and ly was added to the end of each...firstly, secondly, thirdly, fourthly). I have many a student that despite the fact that their essay is not written in chronological order, and firstly, secondly or fifthly don't fit into the natural flow, of their essay, still manage to insert them at the beginning of each paragraph. I have one freshmen this year who has handed in a first, second, third essay EVERY time I've assigned a formal piece of writing.

9. And of course there is the ever present spell check excuse, "Spell check said it was spelled right." Again, my spell check does not talk to me and a conversion is not a conversation, nor is definitely, definatly. Prosthetic is not prostate (this is my favorite) and like and lick do not mean the same thing nor do they belong in a sentence unless like is used as a verb.

10. " I knew Right away that equality in the book anthem was not going to Stay in his House." Random capitalization. When I want them to capitalize important words (their names), they don't but they sure can capitalize random words.

At least there's never a dull moment in the world of education! To be continued....