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Re: Spelling and Grammar in our e-mails



A pedagogical tip:

On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Michael Edmiston wrote:

Joel asks if the dropping of "d" in words like measured and closed is
accidental or deliberate.

I believe we have quite a few students who talk a lot, but hardly read
and write. In this verbal culture they don't envision the words as
particular combinations of alphabetical characters. When they write
something they spell words the same way they say them. When I circle
misspelled words they sometimes ask what is wrong with what they wrote.
When I tell them, they think I'm crazy.

Student: Whas wrong withis?
Me: The word you need is measured (spoken emphasis on the d). You
should say, "Yesterday I measured the temperature."

Rather than <telling> them what they should say (the voice of
authority resounds), <ask> them for the dictionary definition of the words
they use. My experience is that some of them will thank you for teaching
them about the existence (and availability) of dictionaries.




Student: Huh-uh. Yesday I measure the temture.

Please note that my attempt to describe the way some students talk
should not be taken as any sort of racial or ethnic comment. Students I
deal with are 95% northwestern Ohio Caucasian students. They proudly
call themselves ordinary Americans. Most are rural, coming from high
schools where their graduating class was smaller than 100 students, but
some are from urban areas. Many are first generation college students.

Of course I see many students who talk well and write well. When the
better students omit the d from measured it is probably a typographical
error followed by poor proofreading. But there are cases for which
proofreading won't catch the error because measure is exactly the word
the student thinks he needs because that's the way he says it.

Also note that I have been teaching the same courses at the same college
for 25 years. There is absolutely no doubt that student writing ability
is much worse now than when I started teaching. I have samples of lab
reports throughout the years and the degradation in writing is easy to
spot. If I take the time to mark this, it take me a lot longer to grade
lab reports today than it used to. Some of that is because there are
students coming to college today who would never have gone to college 25
years ago. But that's not the only cause. Students are not writing
very much in the K-12 school systems today. I suspect this is mostly
because teachers just don't have the time to grade it.

Michael D. Edmiston, Ph.D.
Professor of Physics and Chemistry
Chair of Sciences
Bluffton College
Bluffton, OH 45817
(419)-358-3270


--
"What did Barrow's lectures contain? Bourbaki writes with some
scorn that in his book in a hundred pages of the text there are about 180
drawings. (Concerning Bourbaki's books it can be said that in a thousand
pages there is not one drawing, and it is not at all clear which is
worse.)"
V. I. Arnol'd in
Huygens & Barrow, Newton & Hooke