help me help this girl pass writing!

November 16, 2007 7:41 AM

I will be tutoring my friend in writing skills. I am not a teacher. HELP PLEASE

I have a friend in college who has terrible writing skills. This includes all basic skills including spelling, grammar, and vocabulary. (The other day she asked me how to spell 'choke.' Today she asked me if we could go over the ed's and s's.) She has failed her ACT writing exam at least 4 times. I bought a grammar workbook to help her with but the task seems daunting. I assume I will have to go over subject-verb agreement and all that stuff I've forgotten since grade school. Does anyone have any advice? I plan on making her write a LOT during our sessions.

posted by pinksoftsoap to writing & language (19 comments total)

Is her first language English?
posted by mdonley at 7:49 AM on November 16, 2007

With spelling, it really seems that drills are the only way that sticks.

One thing that worked for me was typing something where it marks up your misspellings as you type. Then, I would look up the word and write the correct spelling of the word in my notebook 5-10 times.
posted by drezdn at 7:52 AM on November 16, 2007

Get her addicted to a text based game (i.e. mud). She'll spend way more time writing there, and be mocked for any obvious errors... she'll learn.

Otherwise, just talk to her online through IMs, and correct her. Writing "papers" makes it harder to learn, since she'll have to come up with something to say. If it's a conversation, she'll be much more relaxed, as well as learning by example (from reading your writing).

Of course, next you'll say she doesn't have access to a computer or the internet, which will make all of this very difficult...
posted by anaelith at 7:55 AM on November 16, 2007

Have her type everything into MS Word. EVERY TIME the spellchecker underlines something, write it down. DON'T let her use right-click to correct the word. She can look at Word's suggestions, but she has to retype the mispelled word herself.

I'm a terrible speller, but like most bad spellers, I make the same mistakes over and over. I've gotten better since forcing myself to use the above technique.

Grammar is just something you have to study. I would come at it from multiple sources. Find her a fun book about grammar (e.g. The Transitive Vampire), teach her how to diagram sentences, and give her some drills (in this sentence, what is the adverb?).

Once she has spelling and grammar down, just pick a subject and have her write about it. The force her to rewrite many times (at least five times). Bad writers (a) don't know the rules and (b) don't care about them enough to do rewrites. They also assume that good writes don't rewrite. Surely when Stephen King writes, the words just flow complete from his mind to the paper. Wrong.

As she rewrites, have specific things in mind for each go-through:

-- make all (or most) sentences active rather than passive.
-- center most sentences around verbs, not adverbs or adjectives.
-- write sensually. Go through each sentence and ask "Which of the five senses does it evoke?" If the answer is "none," there better be a pretty good reason. (Hint: this is why people use metaphors. When writing about something abstract, metaphors can help you evoke sensuality.)
-- kill all your darlings. ABSOLUTELY no gratuity.

Once she's done her rewrites, tell her to rewrite it again and cut the wordcount in half. This is really hard, but really useful. You have to kill a lot of darlings and make decisions about the what is and isn't absolutely vital to the piece.

Once this is done, make her cut it in half again. Repeat until the whole thing is one paragraph long.

Bonus Zen Guru Master: when she's become an expert at all this stuff, forcer her to spend a month writing everything in e-prime. I don't care about e-prime's philosophical ideals. Nor do I think all writing should be done in e-prime. But I DO know that my half-year spent writing that way greatly strengthened my writing ability.

Key references:

Orwell: Politics and the English Language

Twain: Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses
posted by grumblebee at 8:09 AM on November 16, 2007

Some background: English was not her first language even though she was born here (America). I think she just fell through the cracks (obviously) for many years.

She does have a computer and is online chatting often. I can suggest having her im in proper english but who does that? I almost feel as if that would turn her off more because no one likes a grammar nazi in cyber world.
posted by pinksoftsoap at 8:21 AM on November 16, 2007

Bad spelling is secondary to bad grammar. She needs to learn the rules of writing before she should worry about spelling (particularly today when word processing software can correct spelling mistakes, but flub grammar.)

So buy her a copy of Strunk & White. It's cheap, small, a quick read, and an excellent reference. Make her read it, then read it again, and then take it with her everywhere.

But really, it's no accident that the best writers I know are also prolific readers. Inversely, the worst writers I know don't own a single book. She should find one thing that she enjoys reading and read it daily. This can be a newspaper, a magazine, a blog, or whatever so long as it is written well.
posted by wfrgms at 8:22 AM on November 16, 2007

Just be careful. You don't sound particularly confident at the moment, and you want to make sure you aren't teaching her incorrectly. You might want to go to a used book store and see if they have any old english texts from middle school. You could work through the lessons with her and know with certainty that you were correctly teaching her.
posted by greekphilosophy at 8:26 AM on November 16, 2007

Actually, my friends and I generally chat in proper English, or something very close to it - we're sometimes iffy on capitalization and punctuation in short phrases, but otherwise, our IM-grammar is the same as our writing-grammar. Granted, we're heavy on the bibliophiles and writing nerds, but even so, even my non-wordsmith friends IM close to proper English. And it really is a good way to practice, because it's freeform and conversational while providing a good way for you to provide correction and feedback.
posted by Tomorrowful at 8:26 AM on November 16, 2007

Also, I resent the implication that nobody uses proper spelling and grammar in IM or other online channels. I certainly do, as do every single one of the people with which I regularly communicate. It's great, wonderful practice for writing correctly. As well, Adium and Trillian both have inline misspelling correction/notification. Excelsior!
posted by TheNewWazoo at 8:28 AM on November 16, 2007

I can suggest having her im in proper english but who does that?
I do.

no one likes a grammar nazi in cyber world
I don't know about that, but I do know that I don't like having my regard for good writing (even online) disparaged.

There are two things I've found to improve my own writing: reading a lot, and having my writing mercilessly red-penciled. So, give her reading assignments, writing assignments, and brutally mark up her work.
posted by adamrice at 8:54 AM on November 16, 2007

Just to keep things from derailing, I was not intending to offend anyone who IMs in proper english as I do so as well. However, I also respect people who choose not to do so and consider online their informal communication tool.

My point was just that I do not think she would appreciate my correcting everything she said on AIM. I appreciate all the suggestions so far though, please keep them coming!
posted by pinksoftsoap at 9:04 AM on November 16, 2007

I teach English to non-native speakers outside the US, so I assume my experiences helping people improve their written English will be different from those recommending Strunk and White or other grammar reference books designed for native speakers, which your friend is not. (By the way, if you know, what is her first language?)

First off, I'd accept the fact that you won't be able to re-teach her the English language as she knows it. It's probably beyond any one person's ability to do so, and she might resent efforts beyond what she considers your purview. Furthermore, written English and spoken English skills can often vary dramatically for an individual, so don't be surprised if she uses a word all the time but has only a foggy idea how to spell it or only vague notions about what it means.

So were I in your position, I'd address things at a level of helping her with her academic assignments as they come up, with enough time before due dates for her to work through multiple drafts - a first and a final, at least, both sent on to you, with your comments appended as footnotes or as inline text (here's a quick guide on how to do this in Microsoft Word). This way, you don't have to stress about getting things right right away, individual changes can be noted and saved by both you and her, and you can also see what errors she makes more often than others. Keep a "progress log" and check in after the first five or ten assignments she's written to talk about how her writing has changed. (Additionally, printing out drafts and doing some work with a pencil makes changes a little more real. Just a little tip.)

After the first few edits, you'll have a pretty good idea of the issues she has, and that will help you zero in on what needs to be done and worked on. Keep in mind throughout this whole process that because she's not a native speaker, there might be some metalanguage (which is a fancy word for the language we use to talk about language, like "adverb" and "past participle") that doesn't make sense to her. Russian and Latvian, two languages I work with at the school where I teach, have no articles (in English, these are a, an, and the), so there's constant chaos in every class we have, from beginners to advanced levels, when it comes to remembering to include articles in written texts.

Also keep in mind that there are heaps of things in English that just are the way they are for no reason other than conventional use, and that that's (mostly) fine. For example: American English speakers might be more prone to say "I have an umbrella" instead of what a British or Australian speaker might say ("I've got an umbrella"); I have no idea why this difference exists, or why it's mentioned in so many of the teaching materials I use, but both are, of course, perfectly acceptable and understandable to all speakers.

Final note: if you do decide to purchase a grammar reference for her, stay away from books that are written for an airport-bookstore audience, demand adherence to particular maxims or hallowed rules, or involve Lynne Truss. At work, we've got a big selection of grammar references, but the one I go back to often is Michael Swan's Practical English Grammar. It is a reference work, incredibly comprehensive for even advanced points (which it doesn't sound like she's up to yet), and covers things that will help her where books designed for native speakers will not, like why we say "It's rainy" but not "There's rainy," or when it's appropriate to use something like gonna in writing.

Final final note: here's a discussion from a few weeks ago on a tangentially-related subject, and here's my favorite dictionary (with links to Indo-European roots - perhaps useful if your friend's first language is Indo-European too!)
posted by mdonley at 9:19 AM on November 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

Visit the Purdue University OWL.

Tons of explanations, handouts, examples, whatever. Start at Grammar and Mechanics, and take it from there.

Good for you, BTW, for helping out, and good luck.
posted by notyou at 9:20 AM on November 16, 2007

Rats! The link to the dictionary at the end of my post should be this.
posted by mdonley at 9:22 AM on November 16, 2007

Oh yeah, the OWL is great too. Good call, notyou.
posted by mdonley at 9:22 AM on November 16, 2007

Seconding Strunk and White.
posted by history is a weapon at 10:02 AM on November 16, 2007

Read more books
posted by PowerCat at 10:54 AM on November 16, 2007 [1 favorite]

You're right, telling her to use proper spelling and such in every day IM conversations probably wouldn't go over very well. I was more suggesting that instead of "making her write a LOT" of papers during your session, you do it in a more conversational, back and forth IM-type setting, with you correcting her as you go along. I bet if you offered it to her as a choice, she would jump at it, especially since she seems to want to or have to spend that time working on her writing anyway.
posted by anaelith at 11:22 AM on November 16, 2007

I second Powercat. You learn to write through reading. Absorbing grammar is slow, so maybe focus on one or two things at a time, and then ask her to look for examples in texts that she is reading.
posted by gesamtkunstwerk at 5:05 PM on November 16, 2007