Grammar Snob

My father is British. He is your prototypical Englishman and loves when "his language" is spoken and written the way it was meant to be. Being my father's daughter, I have inherited his fondness for proper grammar, which has been both a blessing and a curse during my academic career.

One of the aspects of becoming a Writing Consultant that I have struggled with thus far is that we are not meant to fix every grammatical or spelling mistake in the papers that we read. I understand why we must restrain ourselves, but I must admit that I have had difficulty doing so in the first two commentaries that we have done in class. I think that I must, and will, find a happy medium between being the grammar snob that I am and using a writer's grammar mistakes as a long-term writing tutorial.

Personally, I find it difficult to pay attention to a paper that has a glaring number of grammatical and spelling errors. I would love to find out if professors have the same difficulty that I do when students do not have a grasp on grammar rules. I believe that most of them would agree with my claim that an overwhelming number of errors can detract from the perceived intelligence of a student. For example, I recently read a peer's paper in which he had spelt pamphlets 'pamflits'. The ideas of the sentence and paragraph were good ones, but I could not take the paper as seriously as I would have if he had spelt the word correctly.

I think that addressing sentence-level concerns will be one of the more difficult tasks that we are faced with as Writing Consultants. As we saw in Bartholomae's "The Study of Error" and the videos from "The Fix-it Shop", most students find it difficult to see their own errors. I believe that an effective tool would be to write out examples of sentences with errors similar to those made by the students, in hopes that they would be able to find the errors in the "consultant's" writing that they could not find in their own.

I wish that I knew a more effective way to show my peers the importance of proofreading their papers for glaring grammatical errors. Being a business major, I cannot tell you how many horror stories I have heard of potential internships or jobs lost due to obvious language problems. I hope that I can learn a way to show my peers that these rules do not simply affect your life at UR, but could affect your life after as well.

Afraid of Grades

Since my elementary school days, my mother has been pushing me to get good grades. She would always say, "You don't want anything bad to pop up later on, do you Claudia?" Being the timid six year old that I was, I would nod and race off to do my homework at the kitchen table. As time went on, my mom continued to push me in academics. I could not tell you how many times I heard, "Do you want to get into a good college?" during my four years of high school.

Obviously, my hard work paid off. The University of Richmond is a wonderful institution that has opened so many doors for me. That, however, does not mean that my mother's nagging has stopped. "Do you want to get a good job?" is all I hear now, but based on where I am today, I know that she has my best interests in mind.

The thought of being a Writing Consultant is a bit terrifying. Because I have always been pushed to get the highest grades that I can, it scares me that advice that I give (or don't give) could affect someone else's grades. Here, papers are generally a large portion of your final grade and, as I have learned in the past, getting a C on a paper only makes you have to work harder to pull yourself into the A range.

It is an honor to even be considered to be a Writing Consultant at UR. The influence that you could potentially have on a peer's grade is frightening and exciting at the same time. I worry that I will skip over an entire plagiarized paragraph, which could cause my peer to have to face the Honor Council. I am afraid of not understanding the given assignment entirely, which could cause me to give awful advice. It scares me that my words could affect someone else's paper, final grade, job prospects, life.

I know I am being a bit dramatic, but that has always been the way I have thought about my own grades. I think that as I become more comfortable about what a Writing Consultant actually is (through my observations and practice), my fears will subside and I will be able to help my peers to the best of my ability.