Director: Matt Moses Supervisory Staff: Julie Forgione, Desiree Evans, Zainab Shah, Bryant Contreras, Kevin Campbell Facilitator: Desiree Evans
Rules of Writing!: Revising for Grammar, Punctuation, and Mechanics Tutor Talk! 1. What are the basic grammar skills a writing tutor should know to tutor well? 2. What is the difference between grammar and syntax? 3. What is the relationship between content and grammar in an essay? “If you are not an expert in grammar, you are expected to A) Admit when you don’t know B) Carefully check what you think you do know C) Study- Work on your grammar continually: read, do exercises, talk to other tutors about grammar D) Familiarize yourself with books to go to when you don’t have an explanation for grammar” (The Writing Tutor, Arkin and Shollar 66)
Student Papers Professor Isabel Feliz of the Language and Cognition Department provided a list of the grammar problems she and her colleagues observe regularly in student writing: Basic sentence structure, including it, verbs, avoiding fragments, choosing tenses -ing use: as subject, after prepositions, after verbs -ed use, including past, passives, adjectives Commonly confused words: they/there/their, other/others, like/as, than/then 1. subject/verb agreement -- he/she/one -- along with "people" needing the plural rather than the singular verb form and students not being able to distinguish the differences between EVERYONE, EVERYBODY, NO ONE AND ALL THE PEOPLE in terms of subject-verb agreement Related to this problem,: students do not know how to parse sentences and desperately need to understand that certain phrases can never be considered "subjects" 2. Preposition + ING -- and not knowing when to use the gerund or the infinitive for certain expressions -and not understanding how "to" is sometimes part of the infinitive and sometimes a preposition 3. PASSIVE VOICE -- always forgetting to dignify the past participle with a "d" if it is a regular form and forgetting the irregular past participle forms of some verbs -- along with putting in "FOR" instead of "BY" before the agent (the Spanish "POR" insisting on its legitimacy!) 4. recognizing the need for CONDIITONAL FORMS in hypothetical "contrary-to-fact" situations/as well as the different "if" combinations 5. verb tense consistency in paragraphs 6. word forms -- noun/verb/adjective/adverb