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| Canadian squirrel, eh? And yes, 2 people have already written in to tell me it's not ACTUALLY a squirrel. So, I'm all good on being told my work continues to be poorly done and inconsequential. Did I spell Friday right? |
This year I think I may try to put a small dent in their illiteracy by kicking off lectures with a little "word of the day" exercise. I have my own pet peeves like "efficient vs effective" (that's germane to logical thinking) and "lose vs loose" (that's germane to not looking retarded). And I suspect I could also use this towards some process of snowflake melting. So perhaps I'll start with the word "fair", which my flakes seem to think means "in perfect alignment with my personal preferences, and the rest of the class be damned", as opposed to "on equal terms as all the other students, even if those terms bite".
I know we tackled a related topic a few weeks ago, where it was discovered that none of our students understand the word "deadline". But I'd like to focus here especially on the literacy issues that hurt the students the most - the "high-leverage, impactful issues" (how's that for sounding like a biz prof?).
So, my question to you:
Q: What are the individual word usage errors that are holding your students back the most? Do you have any good teaching examples or mnemonics that can help them appreciate and remember the correct usage?
I'm not looking for relatively subtle points, like how it is actually okay to "effect an affect." I'm looking for the mistakes that require direct application of a clue-by-four.
Bonus points if fixing the usage error also melts snow a little!
I don't really have what you're looking for, but the defiantly / definitely one always mystifies me. Accept and except get swapped all the time.
ReplyDeleteWhat's more important to me is how little they care about the differences.
If I have one more snot-nose kid say, "Well, you knew what I meant," I'm going to lose it.
PS: Congrats on 6 million! Because large numbers are hard to put into perspective, think of it this way: Ben, Cassandra, Cal, and Leslie had to each push RELOAD 1.5 million times these past 3 years.
DeleteNow, there's some science.
Cal, some more "not squirrel" votes came in.
DeleteI've read the wrong affect / effect for so many years that I no longer know how to use either anymore.
ReplyDeleteLeslie K
It's a chinchilla, and it originally adorned a post on teaching metaphors (I supplied the chinchilla pic, grabbed from the web, some CM elf -- probably Cal -- added the colorful letters). It's always fun to see it pop up in other contexts (and hey, it's rodent -- one that always appeared to me to be made up of spare parts from other rodents -- so it fits with overall CM themes. Now if someone could just create a duck-billed chinchilla -- the photoshop equivalent of one of those odd taxidermy hybrids -- we'd really be thematically coherent).
ReplyDeleteMy students (especially bright ones in the sciences for whom English is a second language) have problems with the various forms of "research," especially the fact that "research" doesn't take an article ("a research," no; "a study," yes), and can't be made plural ("researches" is a verb, and only a verb). Even some of my English as a first language students have trouble with this. If they could just get it straight, they'd sound much more professional.
Then again, I had one this summer who apparently couldn't settle on a spelling of hir own name (a transliteration from another alphabet, so there's room for interpretation/debate, and maybe (s)he didn't like the form INS/ICE/her parents saddled hir with, but decide on one form and stick to it already!)
I haaaaaaate "a research" and "several researches" too, but I actually ran across "research" used as a noun. Specifically, the word appeared in this month's Scientific American as part of a reprinted article written by a Nobel Prize winner. It gave me pause, I tell you what.
DeleteWell, research is okay as a collective noun (I think that's the right terminology): "His/her research," "research conducted at [institution]," etc. It's just not "hir researches won hir the Nobel Prize" or "the researches I read," or anything like that.
Delete"Research" was used in "several researches," IIRC. (It was actually last month's SciAm, it turns out, and I've since pitched it and can't doublecheck.)
DeleteP.S. Watching the CM "odometer" is a bit nervous-making, since my car just died a few digits short of 181K. Maybe we should just hold our breaths and hope it happens quietly in the wee hours?
ReplyDeleteEvery book is a "novel," whether it is fiction or nonfiction. Every short piece of prose is a "story," whether it is an essay, a study, or a story. There is no way to teach students otherwise. I have tried.
ReplyDeleteOh, yes; I see that one, too. In fact, it's a reflection of how much time I spend teaching outside my original specialization (literature, with, in fact, a genre specialization in the novel) that that wasn't the first one that came to mind.
DeleteGod yes. that drives me fucking nuts. I'm also a stickler for pointing out when students use logic words - 'thus' 'therefore' 'consequently' etc - when they haven't actually earned the conclusion or assertion that follows. I'll always query students about this in my comments and discuss this anytime I'm giving a class pointers on writing. For them those words seem to be used as just filler. I actually think a bit of symbolic logic or some formal training in logic and fallacies should be a prequisite to taking any class that requires significant writing.
DeleteThere are words that bother me, and words that irk me, but I'm not sure there are words that trip up my students.
ReplyDeleteI suppose there was the time that a student wrote about the "intensive purposes."
Everyone wants to use "per se" and no one EVER uses it correctly.
People on the news really struggle with "decimate." (they always use it to mean utter destruction rather than reduction by 10%)
And I seem to have an issue with using the word dickhead inappropriately. So there's that.
People on the news (including NPR(!)) also regularly mis-use "begs the question," which I strongly suspect is an unintended consequence of teaching logical fallacies in composition classes (people are now vaguely familiar with the phrase, so they use it, but they still don't understand what it means). Maybe we'd all be better off if we intentionally made noises like the teacher in Peanuts cartoons. At least we couldn't be misunderstood. . .
DeleteIt's worse when the spell it "per say".
DeleteI kid you not: I had someone make per se into "past tense" by using the phrase "per said."
DeleteTo make matters worse, this person was my boss and used it during a training exercise. COME ON. Really?!
Most folks who've told Cal he's an idiot say it's a chipmunk, and definitely not a Canadian anything.
ReplyDeleteAll I know is it tastes like squirrel, and that's close enough for me.
DeleteAs I said above, it's a chinchilla, a cliff-dwelling rodent originally hailing from the Andes. I'm not sure whether they're usually considered edible, Cal (though most rodents are, at least in a pinch; guinea pig is apparently a favored dish in its place of origin), but you can make a fur coat out of one (well, actually, only if you're very small; otherwise, it takes quite a few to make a fur coat). One can also enjoy their coats while still attached to the animals, which make quite charming pets (a friend breeds them; one does have to deal with the fact that they like to climb vertical things if available and cache stuff, bounce off walls if not, and chew paper; you can imagine the potential hazards in an academic household, where bookshelves make pretty good climbing/nesting/caching spots in their opinion). The do have some tooth problems, since the pet ones descend from the ones bred for fur coats (which weren't intended to live for long). But generally, they're a pretty good slightly-more-exotic (and marginally higher maintenance) alternative to a hamster, gerbil, or guinea pig.
DeleteCould it defiantly be a squirrel or a chipmunk? Perhaps a research is warranted.
DeleteMaybe it defiantly *wants* to be a squirrel or a chipmunk. Determining that would presumably require a psychological research.
DeleteAnything having an apostrophe in it.
ReplyDelete"Simple" vs "simplistic" gives me the grumples. For some reason every student who ses the word "secular" thinks it means "religious". In my neck of the woods in Small Mammal Material Culture I also have problems with alter/altar, tempera/tempura (my favorite), and art students sadly using crap they've picked up photoshop command menus as real terminology.
ReplyDeleteUsing "loose" for "lose"!
ReplyDeleteAnd a second for Ben's apostrophe. Where, for the love of Dog, did this come to be how plurals are formed?
According to the Oxford Grammar Dictionary, the unnecessary apostrophe in a plural is also called the greengrocer's apostrophe. Mebbe that says something about the origins?
DeleteI suspect it migrated from abbreviations for years. '80s TV shows-->80's TV shows (half correct, if you think of the shows as belonging to the 1980s) -->80s TV's-->1/2 off TV's. I'm pretty sure electronics peddlers are at least as guilty as greengrocers.
DeleteYes, the unnecessary apostrophe for plural and plural for possessive.
Delete"No."
ReplyDelete'Tain't something one sees in academia, but the spelling error that chaps my ass is "whoop ass." Fer fuck's sake...it's whup ass. The first is a sonorous bunghole; the second is a beatin'.
ReplyDeleteSong. Every. piece. of. music., from a string quartet to Beethoven's "5th Symphony" is a "song". Nothing can deter them from this one.
ReplyDeleteThe "Moonlight Sonata" IS a pretty good song, though.
BTW, "Come Together" is not a song, but rather a tune. So, a long, multi-movement work with no vocal is a song, but a short piece with a singer is a tune.
DeleteI gave up trying to get my head around this long ago.
Novel. Every damn book is a novel.
DeleteI am so going down to my garage right now and making my own "clue-by-four" to take back to my office with me in the Fall.
ReplyDeleteI know I shouldn't like this, but can't stop laughing.
DeleteThis is more general, but one of my peeves is students who don't attempt to learn the vocabulary because spelling won't be graded.
ReplyDeleteyeah I'm not gonna dock them for a misplaced vowel here or there, but longer names become a problem.
If they write Anenylyl diesterase...... do they mean Adenlyly cyclase or phosphodiesterase? Two enzymes which have exactly opposite functions.
I suspect that when they aren't sure of the answer, but have narrowed it down to two options, they will make a chimera of the words and argue for more points based on "spelling".
Oh, yes. A student once complained after class that I took off points because they misspelled a chemical symbol. I simply couldn't figure out how to explain to the student that spelling is irrelevant for a one- or two-letter symbol. It turns out, the student was just kidding and wanted to see my reaction. Funny funny. Har har.
Delete"Disconcerning" for disconcerting.
ReplyDelete"Taunt" for taut
But I believe that I lose days from my life every time I read/hear: "would of"
There's always the "royal thrown." That cracks me up every time.
DeleteSeveral of the comp texts I've used have either a chapter or a section in the Appendix that list these kinds of words. Sadly, for me, it's not just word mess-ups that are holding them back. A complete lack of ability to write a complete sentence that then follows another sentence in logic or topic is the problem. They have a complete lack of understanding of what a paragraph is.
ReplyDeleteNo one knows how to use "literally" vs "figuratively" anymore - which was exemplified in the previous day's post about the Sorority Girl Crazy Email.
ReplyDeleteI've given up on most of these, especially "beg the question" and "uninterested"/"disinterested."
ReplyDeleteGetting them to spell "Eliot" or "Woolf" or "Yeats" correctly would be nice, I guess.
I spend most of my energy telling students that simply using the word "society" does not an argument make. But I don't suppose I'd call this a "usage error."
"And etc." is always fun.
Students do not know the rules for writing numerals versus when to spell out the number. I need a freakin' rubber stamp that says, "You cannot begin a sentence with a numeral."
ReplyDeleteI had a student just the other day plead for me not to fail hir--hir mother had put up the money for the course and if I failed hir it would be "all for not."
ReplyDeleteMostly the problem I see is that they just don't know how parts of sentences work. They can usually get the nouns and verbs, but they can't get time order from prepositions, they confuse subject and object, and complex compound sentences are gibberish to them. So anything I write for them is subject-verb-object, in chronological order.
My pet peeve is when a student says something is "poorly worded"--I have on occasion said in response that their inability to understand a sentence is not necessarily the fault of the writer. One baffling complaint: a question about a battery, which put out some current for some time. The question was, "how many charges left the battery"? The students were confused by this, arguing whether it meant "how many charges ARE LEFT in the battery". They did not know how to tell which it was.
Fuck.
ReplyDeleteOne that's always a problem in math is "homogeneous" (stress on the first `e'); say, a differential equation. It doesn't matter how many times I say it, students insist on using "homogeneous" (stress on the second `o'). I don't care what they've heard before, only the first is used in math. Maybe it's regional.
ReplyDelete"Monotonous" (meaning monotone , an increasing or decreasing function) at least is good for a cheap joke.
And I've gotten some mileage out of asking for "operational definitions" of "to understand" or "to explain" (something new.) Of course, first I have to explain "operational definition".