Break the Rules, Learn a Lesson
I know what you're thinking: Well,
the title is a big “of course!” When we break the rules, we learn our lesson.
If we steal something, we get caught, and we have to face the consequences. Why
should I even pay attention to this guy? Well, random Internet reader, you
should pay attention to me because I'm not talking about obvious lessons here.
I'm not talking about the consequences for stealing a candy bar or a car. I'm
talking about a different lesson, a positive one – one your students will be
able to use their entire academic career. Specifically, I'm talking about
lessons that teach you to write properly.
Let me drop a hypothetical: One
day, I decide to teach sentence fragments to a student. I sit down with a list
of sentences, explain how a complete sentence requires both a subject and a
verb, and then go over the sentences with the student to find fragments. Oh
yeah, and in doing all of this, I also put the student to sleep. Sitting and
listening to rules is bad enough, but to then be forced to apply those rules on
a series of bland, unrelated sentences? Boring! How, then, should I teach
something like sentence fragments without putting my hypothetical student to
sleep? I think an easy and fun way to do that is to encourage him or her to
break the rules. Encourage writers to write as many fragments as possible and
see where it takes their writing.
Now, don't get me wrong. I
encourage properly-written English. In my work with Grammarly, I research how
people write and what tools they use to become better writers. In fact, over at
Grammarly, we created a grammar
check that considers over 250 rules for any given piece of text. I
love good grammar. Beyond that, I understand its importance outside my job as
well. In your student's academic career, she will probably have to write
hundreds of things, from resumes to academic papers. Good grammar ensures that
what she writes looks competent.
That said, I also understand
that it's important to have fun when you write. And what's more fun than
breaking the rules? Most first-year college students have a poor opinion of
writing, and that's not surprising. All through school, they've been hammered
with grammatical rules, such as “a complete sentence needs a subject-verb
combo” and “a comma separates a dependent clause from its respective
independent clause.” There are so many rules, and they are so complex,
students' heads often end up swimming by the time they reach semicolons.
To be fair, you could just send
them to Grammarly and let us find the errors for them. We're fine with that.
But, wouldn't it be much more fun to teach them these rules from the ground up,
so they grow up with a healthy understanding of proper English? That way, they
might not feel lost when they get to college and realize that passing English
Composition is required, regardless of their program.
How then can we use breaking the
rules to our advantage? By not only encouraging them to break the rules but
also rewarding them for doing so. Make it a game. In my sentence fragment
example above, what if I would have encouraged my hypothetical student to write
as many fragments as possible and then evaluated his or her writing based on
the number of fragments? From the student's perspective, that would have
probably been way more interesting. “You mean, I get to break the rules? And
you're not going to fail me for it?” From the teacher's perspective, it gets
even better than that. In order to write a fragment, our fictional student
would have to know what a fragment sentence is, and if they're engaged in the
lesson, they're going to learn. If you had multiple students, you could even
turn it into a competition. Have everyone write a story using sentence
fragments; the person who uses the most wins!
Now, to be fair, this idea may
not work with every grammatical error. That said, if you do some creative
adjustment, I think you'll find you can adapt this idea to a lot of different
writing lessons. The key is to engage the students in writing and thinking
about the rules, so they can learn them... even if in doing so, they break a
few rules along the way.
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Bio:
Nikolas discovered his love for
the written word in Elementary School, where he started spending his afternoons
sprawled across the living room floor devouring one Marc Brown children’s novel
after the other and writing short stories about daring pirate adventures. After
acquiring some experience in various marketing, business development, and
hiring roles at internet startups in a few different countries, he decided to
re-unite his professional life with his childhood passions by joining
Grammarly’s marketing team in San Francisco. He has the pleasure of being
tasked with talking to writers, bloggers, teachers, and others about how they
use Grammarly’s online proofreading application to improve their writing. His
free time is spent biking, traveling, and reading.
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