Student Writing Flaws

I found student essay number two to be more free of error than student essay one was. Even though it had less issues in it, it still was not perfect as it is very hard for anyone regardless of academic status to write without error. The three main problems that I found in this essay were spelling, usage, and formatting. Spelling was an issue for the writer of this paper in a few different instances. The errors were small, and I did not find any huge glaring issues, but nonetheless, they were still issues. For example, in paragraph two, the student was referring to “unique intonation” but spelled the phrase “unique intonasion”. There is also another instance of a spelling issue in the second complete paragraph on page three. The student spelled

Something I have found is that when you read something back to yourself out loud, one is able to catch more error than you are when you read to yourself in your head. For the spelling issues, I would recommend that the student remember to use the spelling correction feature on Microsoft Word and that will help them significantly as the misspelled words will be underlined in read. Word is also able to catch some grammatical issues and those will be underlined in green. To fix the usage issues that exist within this essay, is may be effective if the student also remembers what tense that he or she is writing in and try to make it a point to stick to that tense. While the student is reading through their essay, they should also delete all the unneeded words from each sentences. While I was reading this essay, there were a few times that the student could have gotten their point across by using less words. An example of this can be found in opening sentence of the essay when the student states “what the essential pieces are in this puzzle are controversial”. The student could have got the main idea of the sentence simply by deleting the words “what the” and continuing the sentence from there. As far as formatting goes, I think that the student should research correct MLA formatting and become familiar with it.

I definitely think that this second essay was much more effective and well written than the first essay. This essay for me almost brought the topic of language full circle for me and showed the importance of grammar in language. I noted that I did not think that there were many transitional issues in the essay because I believe that this essay could flow many different ways. The way that the author had it set up at the start works and I am able to understand it, but even when I try and move paragraphs around, I am still able to understand and retrieve the meaning of the essay. I think one of the reasons why it is hard to decide positively whether or not there are any transitional issues is because the essay had no thesis or guideline for the reader to follow. Despite not having a thesis, I still was able to understand this essay and comprehend it. I think perhaps something that could make this essay even more effective is a little more background information on the topic. I was able to conclude that the topic is the structure or oral or verbal language, and what constitutes it. I was able to understand this essay because I read the last essay from the student about spoken language in other languages, so I felt that I was already aware of some of the information. This essay is able to be understood without reading the previous essay, but I still think