Last Tuesday was quite a productive day initially. I came into the room and there was a class working on their research papers so I just jumped right in and helped Claudia with two students who needed some help with their essays. They were quite interesting topics as always but yet again I found that it is quite distracting to read a paper that is not written well grammatically. All of the essays I have read at O'Bryant are quite intelligent and much more complicated topics than I remember handling in early high school but they are not very well written grammatically. This can take away from an essay I think and may even weaken their argument just because it is not well formulated. This was also the case with the essay I was sat down to edit after helping this student. The student clearly fulfilled all of the requirements the prompt had and had a good thesis statement, but continuously had sentences that were way more informally written than this blog. That is a very distracting paper to read and also hard to read because it does not flow well. Lesley sitting next to me reading another paper even showed me a full paragraph, from the one she was reading, which didn't have a single period in it.
So this is my proposition: Given that O'bryant, in conjunction with the 826 writer's room, does a very good job of encouraging interesting writing projects, as well as thinking critically about sociologically important topics, I think it would be helpful for the students to do some more grammar and sentence construction work because it seems that the majority of the students are a little behind in this area. Despite how boring and uncreative this might sound, it should be something that they are already able to do, so practicing it now is important to their development as writers I believe.
Caroline
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