My New Teaching Partner? Using the Grammar Checker in Writing Instruction
Excerpt
So which error types did they want to study first? Many students suggested we study passive voice because they see it all the time when typing at a computer but did not know what it meant. I told them that choice was interesting because passive voice first appears in our standards in seventh grade, so it would be a great unit to choose. They also proposed to study comma use because it appeared so often in their documents. I explained that we could focus our comma study on compound and complex sentence structure, one common area of difficulty for both student and adult writers. For the final unit I persuaded students to study subject-verb agreement based on how difficult these errors can be for the grammar checker to detect. It is also one of those difficult areas for both adolescents and adults.
