Blog 8

1. Think about your own writing processes. At what stage in your writing do you focus on the linguistic accuracy of your work? How and where did you acquire the grammatical knowledge that you use to edit your work?

I focus on linguistic accuracy after my initial writing is complete. That statement is probably 80% true. Because I am a native English speaker, I may intersperse developing content with linguistic and grammatical corrections, although I am aware that this latter process slows down the completion of the writing product. My grammatical knowledge has been acquired over years of learning English, since birth. My linguistic knowledge has been absorbed over many years of reading in my genre. As a result, my writing tends to be more formal, more academic, since that has been the bulk of my reading. I often find that I first produce written text for my students, then deliberately re-read and replace academic sounding words with more everyday words – which is quite time consuming.

 2. How effective is your approach to editing your own writing? If it is effective, why do you think so? If it does not always work, what might improve it?

My approach to writing, which is to “do a brain dump” first, then to go back and edit linguistically and re-position the content for a logical flow and style, works to get the written product completed, vs. constantly editing as one is writing. My final read through is for verb tenses, plurals and words that Microsoft Word left behind for me to identify. I think my writing style is effective if I have time. If I have no time, I read for comprehension, noun/verb agreement, and trust that the rest just flowed naturally. 

One area I will have to strengthen is my writing speed. I just must accelerate my rate of writing completion, from pen down to pen up (you know “wheels up to wheels down” in measuring time for a airplane flight.)  The steps I am taking to improve that speed is to read more and to write more often so as to increase turnover speed.

3.  If you have experience in teaching writing, what do you find most challenging about giving students feedback on their language errors (grammar, word choice, spelling, mechanics, and so on)?

When giving feedback to L2 students, I find it most challenging to ignore the desire for perfection, and accept any semblance of progress.  Lately, I have started to be selective in providing feedback. I focus on two areas during the formative feedback stage of writing, and that is just content – what are you saying, and not how you are saying it. The course in English 697 has taught me to take a process approach to writing, so that initially, there needs to be draft produced, which is later followed by revisions. There is a slight drawback with this method in that the students may get a sense of task completion prematurely, and another sense of “not again” when we return to the same writing task. Ferris and Hegcock (2014) noted that “some experts have observed that for real-world writing tasks, students must learn how to edit their texts comprehensively rather than selectively, and that marking only a few errors at a time may not help them to do so adequately” (page 285).  My experience is that all work is time limited, and students should get through phases of completion, with the first phase being complete documentation of thought about a topic, before editing for grammar. Given that many tests are time limited, this method may in the end yield higher marks on a test page if the student runs out of time.

4.  What ideas do you have about the best way( s) to help L2 students focus on editing their written work? Are these ideas congruent with your own editing process? Why or why not?

My approach in helping L2 students to focus on editing their written work will be to follow a process approach to writing,  that manages writing as a product which emerges with guidance in phases.  I will also be more intentional about looking for patterns in errors that the students make so that they can focus on correcting a few patterned, repetitive errors at time, e.g. use of articles.

Ferris, Dana R., Hedgcock, John. (2014) Teaching L2 Composition: Purpose, Process, and Practice. Taylor and Francis. Kindle Edition.