So… I’m digging into the essays, and I decide to type up a few sentences from each student. There are some doozies. Some are horrific, 71-word run-on sentences that occupy several lines of typed text.
Also the illegal govenrment could be good and the illegal govenrment would not have been in power if people could not have been in its favor so there is no such thing as an illegal government because people where in favor of it and made it rise to power it is just a bad govenrment that was chosen so I would not go to civil war against a government that was chosen by the people that want the civil war against it.
You’ll notice that there’s not a single reference to Rome, Julius Caesar, Pompey, Cicero, or any of the other authors we read this term in that entire sentence.
On the other hand, the phrase “illegal government” appears three times, and the word government appears five times. The phrase “civil war” appears twice. Since the essay question was based on Brutus’s question to his friends in Plutarch, “which is better, a civil war or an illegal government?” I guess I should give them a modicum of credit for at least knowing the terms… oh wait, these terms are the ones from the essay question.
Sentence fragments. Two words… the student memorized a list of words relevant to the essay, but then had no idea how to construct them into a sentence. There are comma splices, these things are so bad that it took me ten minutes to figure out how to do one to show you. Spellign erars ov evan cmon worsd.
And I thought… here’s a set of videos!
Now, I don’t have time this week to turn all fifty-one of these ghastly clunkers of sentences or paragraphs into sentences. But I bet I could turn a lot of them into short explanatory videos over Thanksgiving, and put them on the kids’ user pages on the wiki. In some obvious place, of course. Where they’d have to notice them.
I could give them all a copy of the “worst clunky sentences” of the exam, and they could see how they read in the public eye.
But I like the idea of making the sentences into short videos, and explain how to fix their critical problems. Do you, my readers, want to see?