Policy on Grammar and Mechanics

If either of your revisions contain an average of more than two errors per page from among the errors identified below, 3 points will be deducted from your revision for each excess error. It is not rare to see as many as 20 errors per page, especially on the Works Cited page, so penalties for errors can turn even an A paper into an F paper very quickly. Ouch.

You may regain all of the deducted points, however, by correcting the errors.

This policy is applicable to revisions only--not to journal/workbook assignments and not to first drafts of papers submitted throughout the term. Moreover, you may edit your revisions as often as you need to in order to make up the lost points (within the time constraints of the term).

In short, this policy is designed to prepare you for the way things are in college and beyond.

Errors in grammar, punctuation and mechanics are often considered trivial ("what does it matter if I wrote 'it's' instead of 'its'--you know what I mean"), and in some ways this is true. Some errors genuinely do not interfere with meaning; some are so common that few readers notice them. Moreover, many "errors" are not really errors at all, but correct uses of particular dialects which are substantially different from the dialect of Edited Standard Written English (ESWE). Although no one speaks ESWE all the time, requiring "correct" English can legitimately be seen as the imposition of the language of the middle and upper classes on the rest of society.

Nevertheless, it is important that you learn to produce and control ESWE, for three reasons:

1. In some cases, lapses from ESWE really are errors, and directly interfere with meaning by connecting ideas illogically or expressing them inaccurately or ambiguously.
2. Even departures from ESWE which do not interfere with meaning (and still more the departures that do) are distracting to most readers, drawing attention away from what you are trying to say.
3. Command of Edited Standard Written English is a mark of education in our society, a standard by which you will be judged (sometimes harshly). If there are five hundred qualifed applicants for a single position, a sentence fragment in an application letter can cost you a job.

On the other hand, while it is important to be able to produce ESWE consistently, it is also important to give yourself room to make errors in early drafts. Even the best writers make errors in the early stages of a project, especially when they are pressed for time or are working with ideas that are particularly ambitious and haven't been fully worked out yet. Most of these performance errors drop away as the ideas get clarified in the process of revision. Even more important, worrying about mechanical errors too early in the writing process can be paralyzing--you need to be able to turn off the editor in yourself in order to give your inventor self a chance to test out new ideas and new ways to say things.

The grammar policy in this class is designed to duplicate these real-life conditions of writing. In your informal writings and your early drafts of formal papers, you are not expected to produce flawless Edited Standard Written English. However, you are expected to uphold a high standard of ESWE in your most polished work.

In a word, anywhere:

• Any of the online sites listed on the syllabus which give information about grammar, punctuation, and mechanics. These sites, or a grammar handbook if you own one, should be your first source, not because they're the easiest to use (they aren't), but because learning how to use the resources available to you after you leave this class to find the information that you need in order to produce error-free writing is an invaluable skill.
• Other students. Experienced writers depend on the eyes of their friends, colleagues, and editors; why shouldn't you?
• The Writing Center. Tutors in the Writing Center will not proofread or edit for you, but they can help you learn those skills for yourselves, and they can help you learn to recognize and fix the grammatical errors you're prone to.

• Me. I will mark errors on formal revisions with the abbreviations listed below, to give you a start on correcting them. I will also help you understand what your errors are and how to fix them, AFTER you have made a good faith effort to understand and correct the errors on your own. (I will be particularly helpful if you can show me what you don't understand about the explanation in one of the online sites.)

In order to make this policy workable, I am limiting the errors to which this policy applies to those which I take to be the most common or most serious in first-year student writing. Errors not listed on the following page will not be counted in the two-error-per-page average (although they might factor into my assessment of an individual paper--an idea unclearly expressed is an unclear idea).