Instead, I’ve been finding ways to make grammar hilarious. This may be an even harder task.

Luckily, the guys at The Chicago Manual of Style Online have a better sense of humor than me. I recently stumbled across their Q&A section, finding it both informative and witty.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

Q. Is it ever possible to put a period after other punctuation as in: He had asked, “Will she go?.”

A. It’s definitely possible, but it would be wrong.

Q. Oh, English-language gurus, is it ever proper to put a question mark and an exclamation mark at the end of a sentence in formal writing? This author is giving me a fit with some of her overkill emphases, and now there is this sentence that has both marks at the end. My everlasting gratitude for letting me know what I should tell this person.

A. In formal writing, we allow both marks only in the event that the author was being physically assaulted while writing. Otherwise, no.

Comedy and grammar are together at last. But be careful, you might learn something too.

Content-area writing is all about getting students to write outside of English class to help them better engage with and understand course material. Enhancing the lessons of any subject with writing activities helps students build connections, demonstrate knowledge and retain information.

Though its educational benefits are clear, assessing content area writing can be intimidating to non-English teachers. As Debbie Shults notes “some content area teachers feel they are not up to the task of ‘teaching writing.’”

Fair enough.

Luckily, content area teachers don’t have to be writing experts to incorporate writing in their classroom. Writing in a content area should emphasize what is said (ideas, concepts and connections) rather than how it is said (correct spelling and grammar).

General writing skills are important, but students should be allowed to concentrate on delving into the subject matter to wrestle with new ideas without being afraid of misplacing a comma.

Keeping this in mind, Shults suggests using rubrics to “determine the essential criteria of an assignment, describe the various levels of quality, and concisely communicate expectations to their students.” This takes some of the anxiety out of assessment.

Also, avoid limiting yourself to just one type of writing assignment. Shults lists some suggestions:

Solar system web pages, Civil War newspapers, lab reports, immigrant journals, science fair abstracts, play scripts, R.A.F.T. papers, biographies of scientists, interview questions, timeline narratives, response-note taking formats, and storyboards for film or slide presentations are just a few of the infinite and realistic ways content area teachers can help students hone the writing skills that language arts teachers have helped them develop.

At the college level, one of the professors we work with recently added “cases” to his sociology class, where students gather information about hypothetical scenarios then offer arguments to espouse a particular stance. An assignment like this goes beyond demonstrating knowledge and encourages reading comprehension and critical thinking skills.

There are a number of resources on the web with more good ideas for assignments.

It doesn’t take much to put together a few new assignments and quickly get “a window into how students think about the concepts they are learning.” And it’s a significant step toward better education for your students.

I call this writing to the point.

The underlying goal is to remove any content that doesn’t help shape your main point in a unique way.

It’s similar to the system used by screenwriters. When you’re writing a script for a movie, each scene needs to contribute to the underlying theme of your film. If you can’t explain how a scene relates to the overall movie, cut it.

The same process can be used for each word and sentence in your essays.

I recently read some of Ayn Rand’s editing notes for her first draft of The Fountainhead and she repeatedly criticized herself for using adjectives that don’t contribute something distinct to the noun.

I fall into this trap all the time. Often, I’ll end up using two adjectives to describe a noun that mean the same thing, like: “We need to keep our workplace clean and tidy.”.

Just stop it. It’s okay to reinforce your point. Repetition can be a useful technique, if used purposefully.

But don’t add “filler” words and sentences just to take up space. It’s poor writing and less enjoyable to read. Always ask yourself, “Am I writing to the point?”.

Study after study shows that when students are given the opportunity (or in some cases forced) to revise their work, they will learn the material better.

This works in part because students continuously have to review their writing and course material. In turn, students end up pounding the information into their brain.

For example, in a recent Organizational Behavior course students were ask to write a comprehensive essay about one topic covered during the unit. The paper was to be reviewed once by a peer and then later by the instructor. The unit covered a variety of topics about organizational decision making. One student decided to write about groupthink and the repercussions it has in the work place. Her paper was of decent quality, but not stupendous. When it came to the test, however, she nailed every question that was even tangentially related to groupthink. The other material covered on the test she answered at about 75% accuracy.

As you can tell, the topic she chose to write on was the topic she remembered most when test time came. This works because students are going back and making sure their writing is succinct, coherent and generally of good quality and in turn the material sinks in.

This concept is pretty simple, but sometimes it’s easy to forget and abandon revisions or even writing all together in the classroom.

That being said allowing time for revisions and actually reviewing the revisions is one of the most time consuming processes in education. So the big question for us is how do we make sure we can use writing and revisions in the classroom without losing time for everything else?

How to Make Time for Revisions

The key to utilizing revisions is providing feedback. Certainly, each student is capable of reviewing their own work to help them revise, but many times it is helpful to get outside opinions. Here are a few ways to review student work:

• Teacher Review: This requires you to personally go through each student submission and give personal remarks. This type of review provides high quality feedback to students, but also requires a large time investment.
• Rubrics: Rubrics are a set of defined features that are present in a specific assignment. When using rubrics you are able to quickly analyze each student submission and give some quick generic feedback. This type of review provides lesser quality feedback to students; however, it does not require the same large time investment.
• Sampling: If you offer multiple writing assignments throughout the semester you might consider doing teacher reviews for only half the class while the other half utilizes peer reviews. Then when the next assignment rolls around switch who you provide reviews for. This saves some time by allowing you to only review half the assignments; however, students might find it unfair that other peers are receiving more personal attention for certain assignments.
• Peer Review: Peer reviews occur when you allow your students to assess each others writing. With peer reviews there is virtually no time commitment on your part, however, the feedback for students will be of varying quality and may not be accurate.
• Lastly, we would be at fault not to mention or own product, SAGrader. SAGrader will give students immediate feedback on their writing assignments allowing them to make instant revisions. Most of the time commitment for a professor is up front when building the assignments. SAGrader also provides standardized feedback that does not happen with peer reviews.

Obviously, each type of review here has its pros and cons. The best way to make use of review is typically through some combination of these five techniques. This can be accomplished by partnering a high time commitment review process with a lower time commitment review process. This way you can get the best of both worlds. High quality writing reviews with a lesser time commitment than if you were forced to hand review each student submission.

This type of process is very similar to what we accomplish by using SAGrader.

The most important thing to remember is to allow students to utilize these reviews and revise their work. When students are allowed to revise, learning happens.

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In many circles it’s vogue to say that students are getting dumber because of texting and Facebook. Turns out the digital age may have sparked more writing than previously believed.

Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Now students are increasingly communicating online. Most online communication is inherently text. Additionally, most digital writing happens outside of school. In fact a surprising 38% of student’s total writing is happening outside of class.

After giving it some second thought, this makes sense. The opportunities I have to write, compose original thought and discuss current events online dwarf anything my parents generation had.

However, while Facebook, online chat and texting may be increasing the amount of writing students are doing, the real question is does this kind of writing actually improve student’s writing abilities?

According to Andrea Lunsford at the Stanford Study of Writing – Yes!

Lunsford’s team says because students have done so much digital writing and to many different audiences, they have became quite adept at assessing who’s reading their writing in order to drive home their arguments. Thompson summarizes Lunsford quite well:

The fact that students today almost always write for an audience gives them a different sense of what constitutes good writing. In interviews, they defined good prose as something that had an effect on the world. For them, writing is about persuading and organizing and debating, even if it’s over something as quotidian as what movie to go see. The Stanford students were almost always less enthusiastic about their in-class writing because it had no audience but the professor: It didn’t serve any purpose other than to get them a grade. As for those texting short-forms and smileys defiling serious academic writing? Another myth. When Lunsford examined the work of first-year students, she didn’t find a single example of texting speak in an academic paper.

So perhaps it’s not students who are failing to learn to write. Perhaps it is instructors failing to give students a voice.

Of course academia will always have a place for establishing good formal writing skills, but our job as educators has always been to prepare students for the real world. So instead of shunning new technology and social media as a tool for learning perhaps we should let their minds run wild online. After all spending 30 minutes on Facebook writing about the top 20 90s TV shows has to be better than a half hour of MTV.

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It’s no secret that students and the general population are writing less and less by hand.

A quick survey of the Idea Works office found that we do less than 10% of our total writing, including papers, e-mails, notes, etc., by hand. Elementary education students spend less time than ever learning penmanship and more specifically cursive – frequently less than 10 minutes per day. A recent Time Magazine article is already mourning the death of handwriting.

Should we be worried?

The quick off-the-cuff explanation says that educators are simply replacing pen and paper with word processors; however, one quote in the Time article makes me think otherwise – “just 9% of American high school students use an in-class computer more than once a week.”

If students aren’t writing by hand in class and aren’t using a computer to write in class, then where are they writing?

A common response among educators is that students aren’t writing anywhere. Standardized testing has forced educators to teach to the test and if writing is not tested then teachers don’t teach it. No Child Left Behind dictates that most standardized tests stress math, the sciences and reading. As a result, writing has fallen by the wayside.

Penmanship is the one subject that explicitly requires students to write. As a result of penmanship’s diminished emphasis in the classroom and a lack of a substitute, students write less in elementary and secondary grade levels and their writing is of lower quality upon entry into college.

While, I am a poor defender of handwriting (my handwriting makes physicians handwriting look like Spencerian Script), I do know that being able to write well is one of the most valuable assets companies look for when hiring graduates.

If penmanship is destined to be an afterthought, I hope, as a consumer of written media, educators will find ways to continue having students practice writing.

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There may be no definitive answer to this question, but I bet if you surveyed professors nationwide you would find “engaging students” to be a popular response.

Many professors long to see students interact more during class, discuss interesting lectures with their peers and deeply contemplate course material. Unfortunately, most see only a small handful of students actively engaged in learning. While it’s tempting to place the blame on passive undergrads, instructors have tremendous influence over the student experience through the format of their class and the assignments they offer.

A 2008 study at 386 four-year colleges and universities found that writing might be able to help professors out. The study conducted by the National Survey of Student Engagement and published by USA Today found that “writing in college is associated with the kinds of learning that professors and higher-education institutions say they believe is most significant.”

Learning, as suggested by the Council of Writing Program Administrators, happens when students are engaged in the process of drafting, reading and revising their work through dialogue, reflections, and formative feedback from peers and instructors.

Our own studies with SAGrader show students improve their writing performance when encouraged to revise their work. Revision itself, however, is not enough to improve learning. Students need to receive timely, substantive feedback on their work in order to properly reevaluate their rough drafts and create quality final products. The most powerful teachable moments occur when students have motivation, information, opportunity and feedback.

The real story is that good writing assignments are definitely a good thing. When courses provide extensive, intellectually challenging writing activities, the NSSE report found, students engage in a variety of positive activities. They are more likely to analyze, synthesize and integrate ideas from various sources. They grapple more with course ideas both in and out of the classroom. And they report greater personal, social, practical and academic development.

Why do multiple draft assignments work? Because students are urged to consider ideas more than once. A multiple draft assignment tells students the material they are learning is important and must be given ample consideration. In addition, students have the opportunity to go back and revisit their notes and lectures when they realize their first draft has missed vital pieces of information for the assignment. This kind of writing process “is positively related to student gains in learning and to student-faculty interaction.”

So, if you need to jump start your college course, try incorporating multiple-revision writing assignments. It’s one of the best ways to engage students.

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If your students aren’t always enthusiastic about writing assignments, maybe it’s time to try something other than “Tell me what you did on your summer vacation”.

Students will get more out of writing if they’re excited about the topic. Ask a 12-year-old to tell you why he likes Call of Duty, and I bet he’ll produce 3 or 4 volumes of well-developed prose.

Or, as Rob Stone suggests, have them write about music.

As the online host of the iPod-inspired, Writing Across the Curriculum homepage, Rob argues that the two most important things for any student are technology and music.

Thanks to the emergence of personal music players and music studios’ relentless pursuit of students with a disposable income, student’s lives are accompanied by an endless stream of pop music.  While music is primarily distributed for entertainment, most artists explore concepts and themes in their music which may used as a basis for thoughtful writing.

Over at WritingFix, Rob has collected over 50 lessons plans tied to a specific “mentor text” (a song and its lyrics), designed to engage students through writing.

Involving artists like Ben Harper, The Cure, The Beatles, Jack Johnson, and Sara Bareilles, the lessons generally asks students to write a poem that expands on a theme in the song, or to mimic the content and format of a particular selection.

One thing to keep in mind: just because you’re using music doesn’t mean you’re being relevant.  A senior in high school (born around 1991) probably won’t be too familiar with Pat Benatar, Jim Croce, Neil Diamond, or Don McLean.

It’s worth checking out the current Top 30 to see what music your students are likely listening to. Of course, make sure to check the lyrics to make sure they’re appropriate for class.

And there’s no reason to limit the lesson output to poetry.  You can use “We Didn’t Start the Fire” by Billy Joel to prompt some discussion of historical events and how they shaped our society. “The 3 R’s” by Jack Johnson is a great way to get students thinking about the environment and they can help the school “go green”.

Let your imagination go wild.  Then, surprise your students by asking them to take out their iPods instead of their pencils.

I call this writing to the point. The underlying goal is to remove any content that does not help define your main point in a unique way.

It’s similar to the system used by screenwriters. When you’re writing a script for a movie, each scene needs to contribute to the underlying theme of your film. If you can’t explain how a scene relates to the overall movie, cut it.

Use the same process for each word and sentence in your writing.

I recently read some of Ayn Rand’s editing notes for her first draft of The Fountainhead and she repeatedly criticized herself for using adjectives that don’t contribute something distinct to the noun.

I fall into this trap all the time. Often, I’ll end up using two adjectives to describe a noun that mean the same thing (“We need to keep our workplace clean and tidy.”).

Just stop it. It’s okay to reinforce your point. Repetition is a useful technique. But don’t add “filler” words and sentences just to take up space. It’s poor writing and less enjoyable to read.