A Measure of Success

A student who has come in regular intervals over the past few semesters shows up. We each say hey, and he take off his hat and looks at the crown. See, I tease him about wearing Yankee hats. We have a no-Yankee hat policy in the Learning Center*, but he was sporting the Sox (White, not Red) logo, so he was safe. I pointed out that he didn't even know what hat he was wearing today, and we laughed about that.

The hat policy wasn't all he was learning about. Later, after he filled me in on his assignment, a summary of the movie In the Bedroom, he was running through the basic ideas of the story. The class is writing about revenge, and he got to the part in the story when one of the characters wants to take revenge because he got "angry and stuff like that."

The student stopped and said, "No, 'not stuff like that.' He was angry." Then he continued. I felt awesome right then**. I didn't say anything about his use of such a vague phrase. It was like he took a giant pen and scratched a line through what he just said***.

That was cool. That made my morning.

*I find stuff like this helpful to disarm a place like this. It would be easy for a Writing Lab to feel like a nerdcave, academically isolated and only focused on papers papers papers. When we create faux policies like not allowing Yankee hats or requiring people who do math in the writing area to bring us donuts, we poke fun at the institutional nature of the place, show an awareness of the outside world (those Yankee hats never have to do with papers) and show a little humanity (donuts = hungry). Everything is strategic around here, even disdain for that NY logo that shows up on the heads of so many students who can't name their Yankees.

**It only had a little bit to do with the fact that I find myself doing this automatically when I hear words. I don't tell people when I do it. That's rude. I always tell people who ask if I'm going to correct their grammar that I have a policy of not correcting people's grammar out in the real world because people who do that don't have any friends.

**"...angry and stuff like that..."

On the Kind of Attention That Needs to Be Paid

Here is what I tell students who are somewhere in the area of proofreading their work (which they sometimes want us to help with, but more often assume we just do for them):

1. Read Out Loud
It makes your brain process the words again. You need to make your brain do that because your brain is smart and it knows what you want to say. Now, though, you are interested in what you actually did say, not what you wanted to say. When you read out loud, your brain sends the words to your mouth instead of keeping them up in your head.

A high percentage of students tell me that they don't like to read out loud. I tell them that it doesn't really matter if they like it. It's an important step to take to owning the little black marks you printed on a page. Oh, and after I make them start reading, when they see the first few mistakes, they forget about liking or not liking and simply read.

2. Read Slowly
The goal is not to read through your paper so you can say you read through your paper. The goal is to catch little mistakes, and to do that, you need to set your brain to a different mode of reading than when you cruise through a magazine article, brush over an email, or scan an assigned chapter about mitosis for Biology class. To do that, you need to read slowly. You need to make yourself read slowly. At some point, you will speed up. I guarantee it. A paragraph or two into your paper, you'll gain speed like a cyclist riding down a mountain. Hit the brakes. Slow down. If you don't, you'll miss things you are perfectly capable of fixing.

3. Expect Little Mistakes
Finding a mistake is not finding a failure. Finding a mistake is simply finding a spot where you hit the wrong key or forgot a word, or forgot to delete a word, or make a word plural, or etc., etc. When you proofread, you are looking for the missing "s" at the end of a word or the accidental "-ed" that makes the right verb into the wrong tense. You're trying to make sure you put periods where periods should go, that commas are in the right places, and the words that need to be capitalized are capitalized (and the ones that don't need it are not).

These are small, small things. Look closely. Look very closely. They are there. You can find them and fix them.