More shop talk
Scenario:
A student in a second-semester composition course writes an argument paper. It is obvious that this student used a thesaurus (in the first paragraph alone, we have "autonomy," "dyadic," and "succored" -- all used just incorrectly enough to make my head hurt).
On the one hand, it is a wonderful thing that she cares enough about her paper to seek out resources to improve her writing.
On the other hand, it seems clear to me that she went to the thesaurus not to improve her vocabulary, but instead to improve her grade by impressing her teacher with her newly acquired (and incorrectly applied) vocabulary.
So. Educators/Tutors/Etc., what do you do in these instances? I don't have a conference with this student, so it's not something that I'm going to bring up. But philosophically, how do you deal with students like this? I've had them honestly tell me before that they used a thesaurus to get bigger, more "academic-sounding" words, not realizing that synonyms are not always perfect (if they were, there would be little use for both words!). I mean, certainly we address the words individually if the usage is wrong, but how do we deal with the general attitude that "smart-sounding" is better than clear, concise language? I've tried to introduce this idea, but have had few converts. *shrug*
Sorry for the ramble. It's the end of the semester. We have 90 papers backed up; I'm on break and frustrated with these capstone projects coming from students who shouldn't have made it out of ENG 111, much less their entire comp sequence. *grumble*
A student in a second-semester composition course writes an argument paper. It is obvious that this student used a thesaurus (in the first paragraph alone, we have "autonomy," "dyadic," and "succored" -- all used just incorrectly enough to make my head hurt).
On the one hand, it is a wonderful thing that she cares enough about her paper to seek out resources to improve her writing.
On the other hand, it seems clear to me that she went to the thesaurus not to improve her vocabulary, but instead to improve her grade by impressing her teacher with her newly acquired (and incorrectly applied) vocabulary.
So. Educators/Tutors/Etc., what do you do in these instances? I don't have a conference with this student, so it's not something that I'm going to bring up. But philosophically, how do you deal with students like this? I've had them honestly tell me before that they used a thesaurus to get bigger, more "academic-sounding" words, not realizing that synonyms are not always perfect (if they were, there would be little use for both words!). I mean, certainly we address the words individually if the usage is wrong, but how do we deal with the general attitude that "smart-sounding" is better than clear, concise language? I've tried to introduce this idea, but have had few converts. *shrug*
Sorry for the ramble. It's the end of the semester. We have 90 papers backed up; I'm on break and frustrated with these capstone projects coming from students who shouldn't have made it out of ENG 111, much less their entire comp sequence. *grumble*