Is Stephen King?: How Horror and Best-Selling Author Stephen King Inspires My Students to Review Grammar and Punctuation

From PraxisWiki

Contributor: Robbin Zeff
School Affiliation: George Washington University
Email: rzeff@gwu.edu

“My favorite part of the class,” wrote one student on the course midterm evaluation “is the weekly toolbox quizzes.” “My least favorite part of the class,” the student continued, “is the weekly toolbox quizzes. But I guess it’s working.”

I make a review of grammar and punctuation a part of my first-year writing seminar without having to devote in-class time to explaining the virtues of a properly used comma or the confusion caused by a dangling modifier. I do this by having my students take a series of online grammar and punctuation quizzes every week as part of my hybrid Blackboard course.

Let’s face it, there is no topic in writing more deadly for students than the subject of grammar. When I mention to my students on the first day of class that they’re going to take weekly grammar quizzes, I can hear the groaning. “Grammar, we’re in college!” “Doesn’t she know that I got a 6 on my AP?" “Who does she think she is?”

How do I get my college freshman to buy into taking weekly online grammar quizzes? I don’t convince them. I let Stephen King do it. He’s my advocate for establishing a toolbox of writing skills.

On the second day of class, I read a passage from Stephen King’s book On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. The passage tells the story of an experience King had with his uncle when he was a young boy. One day he was helping his Uncle Oren repair a broken screen. His uncle always brought his entire toolbox with him whenever he needed to repair something. The toolbox was handmade by Stephen’s grandfather and probably weighed 120 pounds fully loaded. King describes the toolbox explaining its three levels full of tools. In this story, Stephen and his brother lug the heavy toolbox walking behind his uncle as they go to the back of the house. In the repair process, it turns out his uncle only needs a screwdriver for the job. Stephen asks his uncle why he brought the entire hefty toolbox if he knew he would only need a screwdriver. His uncle replies that he bought the entire box because he didn’t know what else he might find to do once he got there and therefore wanted all his tools at his disposal. King then makes the connection to writing: “I want to suggest that to write to your best abilities, it behooves you to construct your own toolbox and then build up enough muscle so you can carry it with you” (114).

The first layer of our class writing toolbox is command of writing on the sentence level. I call the weekly grammar and punctuation quizzes writing toolbox quizzes to build on the toolbox metaphor. I also include an explanation on my syllabus of why I cover grammar and punctuation in a college-level writing course:

Knowledge of grammar and punctuation alone will not make you a good writer. However, producing a paper riddled with grammatical and punctuation errors will lessen the quality and credibility of your content. In this class, we will work on solidifying your knowledge of grammar, punctuation, and styles so that you have the skills to make sentences and paragraphs say exactly what you want them to say.

These quizzes are tied to the class writing handbook. This semester I’m using Andrea Lunsford’s Easywriter, but I’ve also used Diana Hacker’s Rules for Writers. In fact, any handout book will do.

The quizzes I use are adapted from exercises available with Diana Hacker’s text. These exercises are availalbe (free) as .pdf downloads on the companion web sites for her books (http://www.dianahacker.com). Instructors using the Hacker text can arrange with the publisher to download the quizzes to an individual class Blackboard site (see http://bfwpub.com/lms/index.htm?BSM), or have students take the quizzes through the Bedford St. Martin's website.

The reason I like Hacker’s exercises is that not only are the exercises well written and topical but doing the exercises becomes a learning tool. The student immediately receives an explanation after each question as to why an answer is correct or incorrect. I allow the students to take the quizzes as many times as they want to improve their score. Since my goal with this activity is for my students to better understand the concepts of writing on the sentence level, I don’t mind if the motivation for doing the quizzes again and again is a better grade. The results feeds directly into my goal: a better understanding of writing mechanics. Or to look at it another way, the repetition helps the students build their writing muscles, to build on Stephen King’s analogy.

To prepare my students for the quizzes, I have them read the corresponding section for the topic of the quizzes for that week in the writing handbook. For example, if the quizzes are on commas, then they read the section on commas.

I am also strategic about how many quizzes we do per week. I use a Blackboard feature to only have a selected number of quizzes become available at a time: between two and four 10-question quizzes appear on Monday morning and expire Sunday night. My strategy is to make working on writing on the sentence-level something the students do every week. In fact, we discuss in class that writing takes continual practice. Through this set up, students are forced to do the quizzes and readings each week, eliminating the temptation to procrastinate and attempt to do the entire semester worth of quizzes at the end.

These activities are just one set of building blocks for this layer of their writing toolbox. We also do in-class activities such as sentence combing exercises using their own writing and group-work on writing more concisely.

I integrate the learning from this layer of their writing toolbox into my paper comments. When I notice sentence level issues in a student’s writing, I refer that student to additional quizzes on the Diana Hacker web site or additional readings in our handbook. Since we discuss that everyone has “issues” with their writing (I always share mine), the students treat my suggestions for additional learning as personalizing their toolbox.

I know admitting you teach grammar and punctuation in first-year writing is unpopular these days. But, that doesn’t mean it isn’t necessary. By teaching my course as a hybrid, I can include grammar and punctuation activities as self-paced learning. This frees me up to do complementary activities with my students in a face-to-face environment that examine how every word and every sentence matters in writing. Because the quizzes are part of the many sentence-level activities we do throughout the semester, I never know which quiz or which activity is the most beneficial for which student. All the activities are meant to work together as the content for this layer of the writing toolbox. And the beauty of it all is that I’m able to do this without the typical freshman moans and groans. How? I let Stephen King do the convincing.

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Stephen King. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. NY: Scribner, 2000.