NEED SOME MAJOR HELP WITH RESEARCH PAPER WRITING

[Between Fields]

Thanks for explaining!  I would be curious to read a little about that research, as what I saw was what appeared to be the elimination of grammar in the high school I taught at (as in, students who were getting good grades in English in years past who literally couldn't put together a coherent sentence).  But I'm not sure whether my experience/observations are typical or representative.

 

I'd definitely recommend the Lunsford and Lunsford CCC article "Mistakes are a Fact of Life." It's more about your second point--to spoil their conclusion, student writing has been getting longer and more complex since the beginning of the 20th century, rather than shorter and more error-filled. The sorts of errors are just changing. Due to my need not to make claims without backing them up, I also found an MS thesis that has a pretty solid literature review on the review on the issue of grammar instruction, on ERIC here: "The Effectiveness of Teaching Traditional Grammar on Writing Composition at the High School Level" by Gina Jaeger.

 

But enough thread hijacking with scholarly who-ha.  

[Between Fields]

To digress further, since this field-specific difference interest me: at my small, regional, land-grant institution, in STEM fields, for junior+ level courses any mistake (including grammar & spelling) was half a grade-level off of a report. Been that way in my field (and many engineering fields) for several generations. This is down a bit from earlier generations- when my mother was in school studying engineering, any spelling or grammar mistake was a grade level off, 3 such mistakes was an automatic failure.

 

The idea being that any mistake, even minor ones, distracts the reader severely from the content of the sentence. 

 

It's still the case as well that you're very likely to get rejections/heavy criticism from any journal you submit to with any grammar & spelling issues- we go through papers with a fine-toothed comb to make sure they're all out before submission. It's amazing how many reviewers will completely miss the intent of a paragraph because they're focusing on a typo in one of the lines, or something that doesn't quite read correctly. 

 

So from that standpoint I'm used to it just being assumed that your grammar and spelling are correct- so rather than 10th on the list, I'm used to it being first. It's not the most important points of the paper, but if it is not correct, the rest suffers immensely. For most of our non-native english speakers in grad school, they're strongly encouraged (or required) to have a native speaker/graduate student in the group check over their writing for structural problems before a lot of the faculty will even look at it.

 

And this is definitely not an "ivy elite" connotation in my field, it's assumed in even quite low-ranked programs.

 

I don't feel like this is actually radically different in English--sure, thinking about grammar is low on the list of priorities during the composition process, but if the piece of writing you hand it at the end of a seminar isn't polished and lucid (which means that it's spelled correctly and uses at least some version of standard academic grammar), you're not going to be happy with your grade. While rhet/comp scholarship doesn't advocate a lot of pedagogical effort being spent on grammar, the graduate-level version of English retains a strong bias towards finished pieces of writing. In a 20+ page paper, I might have a few homonym mistakes or something on that order because of the speed at which it was likely written, but I can't fathom turning in something that would have a significant grammatical or spelling issue.

 

The difference is that a professor is likely to be annoyed by these errors, but they're not going to result in that letter grade change in most cases, at least not in the 40 hours of graduate-level English I've been in. If the argument is superficial or (ahem) stupid, that's what's going to get you into grade trouble. So, it's less clear-cut in terms of grade penalty, but the stigma is still there. (It does get a little more complicated in some cases, because certain English professors encourage linguistic diversity, so allowing students to write in something that isn't Standard Academic English, but in the language that they actually speak (AAVE, Spanglish, etc.), on some occasions, but even that is countered by the argument that the language should be tailored to the journal you're submitting to, and there aren't many that go for that.)

 

EDIT: Re, my other posts: I was operating under the assumption that OP is in English or Rhet/Comp, and my advice was given in that vein, because that's where this topic is located, but I see now that she might actually be in some other, related discipline dealing with being a francophile. Mea culpa.

Edited July 6, 2015 by Between Fields

[dr. t]

Honestly, OP is being pretty flippant when people are making points that might not be nice to hear, but don't seem to be mean-spirited. ("Of course I don't edit my writing here" is kind of a weird thing to say in a thread that you're asking for writing advice...) That attitude can't be helpful in the conversations she would need to be having with professors to make positive change necessary to improve as a writer.

 

This is actually something that struck me and served to confirm in my mind the observations I made in my initial post. As I've said elsewhere, there are many ways to address and handle criticism, hostile or not. The original poster would do well to study some of them, as they will certainly find them professionally useful. However, the way they did choose to respond suggests an intellectual immaturity consistent with the disregard for precision of language and thought I noted. 

[unræd]

EDIT: Re, my other posts: I was operating under the assumption that OP is in English or Rhet/Comp, and my advice was given in that vein, because that's where this topic is located, but I see now that she might actually be in some other, related discipline dealing with being a francophile. Mea culpa.

 

They're in a French department, in a program that emphasizes literary study. Others can (and should) chime in, but I think the "A is expected; B means profound doubts about readiness for graduate study" scale is still pretty standard across the humanities, even though things are different in the social sciences and even more so in the natural sciences?

Edited July 6, 2015 by unræd

[Between Fields]

They're in a French department, in a program that emphasizes literary study. Others can (and should) chime in, but I think the "A is expected; B means profound doubts about readiness for graduate study" scale is still pretty standard across the humanities, even though things are different in the social sciences and even more so in the natural sciences?

 

That's probably true, yes. It looks like the same advice has been given to the same poster before, though. 

[lyonessrampant]

I'm not on here often, but I just wanted to jump back in and say that while I am aware that Chicago says you don't need an apostrophe to form plural of capital letters (which explains Telkanuru's commitment to pull a Braveheart on his/her hill . . . historian, no?), other stylistic manuals do require it.  All of this indicates, as the rhet/comp people have so well described, the variability inherent in language, which is why fairly arbitrary insistence about disputed grammar points isn't particularly productive, largely because the hill one is willing to die on may well shift with the next edition of whatever style manual is used, leaving the dedicated combatant without grand.  Does grammar matter?  Sure.  Do lots of obvious grammar errors and circuitous sentences distract from the clarity of both sentence and argument?  Sure.  At the same time, an intensive focus on grammar similarly obscures the clarity of either sentence or argument.  Losing the forest for the trees and all that.  

[dr. t]

Yeah, us historians and our love affair with the CMoS.

 

 Do lots of obvious grammar errors and circuitous sentences distract from the clarity of both sentence and argument?  Sure.  At the same time, an intensive focus on grammar similarly obscures the clarity of either sentence or argument.  

 

I don't disagree. In fact, I don't think anyone here has or would assert anything to the contrary. Somewhere, the argument went astray.

 

When I brought up grammar I - quite clearly I think - was not discussing a pedagogical approach to writing that emphasized wrote grammatical memorization. I was using the grammar of OP's post to highlight their carelessness and sloppiness, evident not in their ignorance of proper grammatical construction but in their apathy towards its application. Nor was this apathy limited to the grammar. It made itself manifest in the organization and structure of their thought and in their misuse of language (e.g. per-se for per se).

 

Accordingly, the advice I gave was: be more precise in what you say and how you say it.

 

I think I've reiterated this point a couple times, but I say it again as I feel that this is a point worth emphasizing. At the graduate level, my impression has been that if you make these sorts of errors, your peers and your reviewers do not attribute them to ignorance, but rather to laziness and carelessness, which is far, far worse.

Edited July 10, 2015 by telkanuru

[bhr]

Yeah, us historians and our love affair with the CMoS.

 

 

I don't disagree. In fact, I don't think anyone here has or would assert anything to the contrary. Somewhere, the argument went astray.

 

When I brought up grammar I - quite clearly I think - was not discussing a pedagogical approach to writing that emphasized wrote grammatical memorization. I was using the grammar of OP's post to highlight their carelessness and sloppiness, evident not in their ignorance of proper grammatical construction but in their apathy towards its application. Nor was this apathy limited to the grammar. It made itself manifest in the organization and structure of their thought and in their misuse of language (e.g. per-se for per se).

 

Accordingly, the advice I gave was: be more precise in what you say and how you say it.

 

I think I've reiterated this point a couple times, but I say it again as I feel that this is a point worth emphasizing. At the graduate level, my impression has been that if you make these sorts of errors, your peers and your reviewers do not attribute them to ignorance, but rather to laziness and carelessness, which is far, far worse.

And again, I'll reiterate that critiquing a forum post for grammar (and using that to make some critical comments about the author's writing skill or ethic) is the equivalent of telling a race car driver how to drive car pool. The two activities are related, but aren't indicative of performance. I get it, sometimes we all desire to feel superior, but the OP came here looking for help, not for a lesson from someone who wants to show some sort of superiority.

 

Maybe I just respect other people at this level enough to know that they can tell if the major problem is grammar, at least based on feedback from professors.

 

(Also, fwiw, during my tenure as an editorial assistant on a major journal, the last thing we looked at was grammar (particularly the minor points you pointed out). Tier one reviews were on content alone, with sentence-level grammar only coming up if it interfered with understanding (something that a missing comma or subject/verb disagreement don't do).

Again, to the OP or anyone else reading this, go to your university writing center, where you can get helpful feedback from experienced writers and editors who understand how to be helpful without being jerks about it.

 

Also, what is "wrote grammatical memorization"?

Edited July 11, 2015 by bhr

[dr. t]

And again, I'll reiterate that critiquing a forum post for grammar (and using that to make some critical comments about the author's writing skill or ethic) is the equivalent of telling a race car driver how to drive car pool. The two activities are related, but aren't indicative of performance.

 

I disagree, and, more importantly, the professors I've worked with disagree. Nor, once again, were the errors confined to grammar. 

 

Maybe I just respect other people at this level enough to know that they can tell if the major problem is grammar...

 

The major problem is not (and has never been) grammar. I'm not sure how many ways I can say that.

 

(Also, fwiw, during my tenure as an editorial assistant on a major journal, the last thing we looked at was grammar (particularly the minor points you pointed out). Tier one reviews were on content alone, with sentence-level grammar only coming up if it interfered with understanding (something that a missing comma or subject/verb disagreement don't do).

 

I've seen several recent book reviews which comment on copy editing problems. However, I'm talking more about how people weight and use your scholarship. FWIW, during my ongoing tenure as the managing editor of a major DH project, one of the first things the general editor looks at before deciding if we will use a particular written source for a map was how well that person's footnotes adhered to the style guide. In other words, their attention to detail in all things.

 

Also, what is "wrote grammatical memorization"?

 

As I'm sure you know, it's "rote grammatical memorization". mea culpa, miserere mei Domine quia ego sum peccator. It's almost like I'm giving the advice that I myself have received and am still working to internalize.

Edited July 11, 2015 by telkanuru