Giving Us the Writing!
"Every Mark on the Page: Educating Family and Community Members about Young Children's Writing" by Kate Foley Cusumano is a fascinating article about the writing process for children. the article was all about telling families and communities that young children's writing process is not perfect!
This act of marking up a child's paper is harmful the child's learning. The adults in their life are looking past the correct spelling that they did, and zoning in on the misspelled ones. This act of simply overlooking turns learning into quizzes and stress rather then actual learning and enjoying the learning.
Parents and teachers should work together to make writing fun for the children and the adults in their life. Writing is an important tool that follows children for the rest of their educational career and their actual careers. Communication is through writing for most of the time, why not when starting young have everyone understand the importance of encouragement versus discouragement.
I was wondering why you didn't give a link for Cusumano's article. So I googled it and found out that was published in Language Arts Vol. 86, No. 1, Explaining Change: Theories in Action (September 2008), pp. 9-17. I got to read the first page of the article at https://www.jstor.org/stable/41962314?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents .
ReplyDeleteYour blog post is filled with many grammatical errors. At first, I thought you were going all meta and enaging in some deconstructivist leg-pulling by modeling the children's behavior as described in the article. But then I went and reviewed your previous blog post and discovered that over 20% of your sentences had grammatical errors:
* One of the ways as teachers to help children read is by the use of Big Books.
(should be, "One of the ways we as teachers help", or "One of the ways as teachers we help")
* Also big books help draw children into the book by the engaging them in the reading and being able to see the pictures.
(Should be "by engaging them". And parallelism would be enhanced via "and by enabling them to see the pictures")
So I'm really torn as to whether or not I should go through your post line by line and point out the myriad of errors. But life is short and I have other blog posts to read, so I'll just critique one sentence. I hope that since you are a college student and not an adult, that my act of marking up your blog will not be harmful to your learning.
Your sentence is
Although in schools teachers and at home with parents, the adults tend pin point the mistakes and "mark" up the paper with an X for wrong!
The opening clause is not parallel:
* in schools <> teachers
* at home with parents
You either need "in schools with teachers" or "at home parents"
"pin point" is one word.
The verb usage is "the adults tend to pinpoint".
The quotations around "mark" are "scare quotes" and thus not appropriate. Either drop them, or instead use more traditional quoting around "mark up".
The word "Although" implies that the rest of the sentence will contain two clauses, of which the second will critique an action in the first. It does not.
Your use of commas hides the fact that you do not have two clauses. You have either too many or not enough. For example:
"Adults (in schools, teachers and at home, parents) tend to pinpoint the mistakes..."
The exclamation mark is unnecessary.
In conclusion, I recommend you have the first draft of your next blog post reviewed by a copy editor, and then follow their guidance as to corrections before posting your final draft.
After all -- writing is an important tool that will follow you for the rest of your educational career and your actual career. If you want to be taken seriously, you'll have to know the rules.