Blog Five: Punctuation

When I was in high school I don’t remember being graded down on punctuation unless it was the final draft of a paper. During in class writings or first drafts, I remember my teachers saying that they weren’t concerned about our punctuation. What they were concerned with was our content and our main ideas. Even when it came time for the final draft, spelling and punctuation only counted for five, ten points at the most. When my teachers marked my papers of how the punctuation should look, I would simply go back and fix it. There were never any explanations of why and I never thought to ask.

Now that I’m in college, punctuation isn’t mentioned much. I’ve only had two, maybe three classes where the professor emphasized that s/he would remove points for each error. I’ve definitely never talked about punctuation as much as I have in the past few weeks. Again though, if there was ever a mistake the professor would mark my paper and I would go back and fix it for either the final draft or for my own records. There was never explanation as to why it was wrong.

I’ve always punctuated in my writing the same way. When I’m writing a paper, I punctuate as I go. But I always make sure to go back and re-read my papers, and I usually make corrections then. I also like to physically print out a copy of my paper. I think it’s easier to make corrections on grammar and punctuation when you read it like you would another paper, and not skim it like you do on a computer screen. I could never write a paper with no punctuation what so ever, and then go back and just add it in. It wouldn’t make sense to me.

Looking at student’s writing from a teacher’s point of view, it’s interesting to think of the grading process. I’m not sure if I’m going to be the kind of grader who marks nothing, or the kind who marks. If I do mark, I want to be sure to explain why I made the corrections that I did. I don’t want students to do what I did and not learn from the marks on the page. If I don’t mark the paper, I would be sure to leave an explanation at the end of what I thought. It depends on the type of assignment it is, but either way I always plan on giving my students feedback.