ENGLISH 1101: COMPOSITION I           news_clr.gif (9841 bytes)     
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Project #1: Some Common Problems . . . and How to Fix Them

Below are five major problem areas that I identified in many of the essays that were submitted for Project #1--followed by suggestions on how you can get to work on fixing those problems before the next essay is due.        
 
1.  Feedback on Drafts
Though submitting a draft to me is optional, it makes a lot of sense to do so.   And the earlier you submit one or more drafts (no matter how rough or incomplete), the more helpful I generally can be.  If you're heading in the wrong direction on an assignment, I can try to steer you back on course.  If I spot recurrent problems, I can call them to your attention.  In any case, the feedback I can provide before an essay is due should be far more useful than any comments I jot down alongside a grade.  

2.  Attention to Project Guidelines
Make sure that you follow the guidelines for each project--as outlined in a handout (or online) and as discussed in class.   For project #1, we considered in class the difference between a private essay (which wasn't assigned) and a personal essay (which was assigned); and in the two-page handout, you were cautioned to "presume that your readers have never been [to the place you've chosen to describe]: one of your primary jobs is to re-create a physical sense of the place so that we may experience it through your words."   If instead you focused on reporting your feelings about a place, you were writing a private essay and overlooking the guidelines (and the interests of the reader).  [Of course, if you had showed me a draft ahead of time, I would have spotted this problem and tried to guide you back to the assignment: see #1.]

3.  Effective Revision Strategies: Content and Development
Probably the single most important aspect of the writing process that we'll focus on this term is revising.  If your drafts look fundamentally similar to the final version of your essay, you may be proofreading (perhaps even editing), but you're not revising.  I strongly encourage you to (1) re-read Hall's essay "The Maker's Eye: Revising Your Own Manuscripts" (pp. 93-97) and (2) begin studying Chapters 18 and 19 (pp. 272-295) in The Blair Handbook.   In addition, you might want to look ahead at Chapters 23 (Shaping Strong Paragraphs) and 24 (Improving Openings and Conclusions).  If you didn't include a draft with your final essay, either you didn't read the project guidelines (see #2) or you really didn't make any effort to improve your first draft. 

4.  Effective Revision and Editing Strategies: Sentence Structures
This next level of revision covers a lot of territory, and we'll be giving sentence structures much attention in the weeks ahead.   Key chapters in the Blair Handbook include 25 (Strengthening Sentence Structure), 26 (Creating Emphasis and Variety), and 27 (Building Vital Sentences). 

5.  Effective Editing and Proofreading Strategies. 
In general, the results of the diagnostic tests correlate with the errors that appeared on your first essays.  Over the next few weeks, we'll review the most common problems in class, but I'll also be encouraging some of you to seek additional help in the Writing Center.  "Major errors" (e.g., run-ons, fragments, reference, agreement, tense) that reappear on future essays will cause your papers to fail; likewise, the repetition of "distracting errors" will continue to lower your grades.  The errors you make are likely persistent habits that we'll work on correcting through class review, but if you need more help than that, be sure to let me know. 

You can begin working on grammatical problems now by checking out any sections in the Blair Handbook that I may have identified on your first essay: see the "Editing Symbols" on the very last page of the handbook.  Following are some of the most common errors that appeared in essays submitted for Project #1: 
(a)  CS (comma splice--also known as run-on sentence): see Chapter 33 in the handbook.
(b)  REF (vague or faulty pronoun reference): see Chapter 36A-36D.
(c)  W (wordy): see Chapter 28.
(d)  CASE and P-A AGR (faulty pronoun case and faulty pronoun-antecedent agreement): see Chapter 36.
(e)  Punctuation errors: commas (Chapter 39), apostrophes (Chapter 42), quotation marks (Chapter 43), semicolons and colons (Chapters 40 and 41); dashes and ellipsis points (Chapter 44).
(f)   FRAG (ineffective sentence fragments): see Chapter 32.
(g)  S-V AGR and T (subject-verb agreement and verb tense errors): see Chapter 34.

English 1101 is taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist.
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia 31419

e-mail: fumnx@netzero.net

   
    08 September 2005