“But let me ask you this, is writing ever really wrong?”
I was in the second semester as a Writing Tutor at my university when I was first faced with this question. During my final observation rehash session, my Writing Center Director whom I greatly respect posed this question to me.
“Is writing ever really wrong?”
And I couldn’t answer. My Director didn’t expect answer then, and left it for me to chew on… for the rest of my life.
Now I hear all you out there, reading my blog, yelling out your definitive answers, not backing down. And I get it because I was right there with you until I really stopped and thought about it.
Initially, it was a simple answer: yes. Writing can be wrong. You can use a comma wrong, your subject and verb can disagree, you can write in second person in an academic paper.
But, does that change the message? Does a run-on sentence change the meaning? Does the wrong verb tense change the overall effect of the piece? Not necessarily. Does it add extra work for the reader in deciphering the message? Perhaps. But, the message still remains.
I then moved to the opposite end of the spectrum in which no writing was really ever wrong, ever. Perhaps an essay doesn’t follow proper English convention norms, but it still makes a strong argument. Maybe the paragraph wasn’t structured the typical way, but it could still be understood.
But, the problem I began to face with this pattern of thought was that the essay may not follow the guidelines established by the teacher or professor. So technically, the writing was wrong.
And I was stuck.
Finally, after a lot of tutoring, thought, and conversations, I have to let myself be satisfied with the fact the writing is a gray area. I have had to set standards for myself to always grade on, such as using textual evidence, citations, and sentence complexity. I also look for proper grammatical structure, but unless it is very poor, it does not weigh as much to me as much as the actual message of the paper does.
Is this the only way to grade papers? Absolutely not. Am I completely satisfied with this strategy? No. But I also know that just like writing is a process, my grading writing will be a process as well.
Stay joyful,
Miss Joekel
Teaching Miss Joekel 