Home | How It Works | Stats Login | Register         Case: Creative Writing This has been going on for some time. Some of the students in my 7th grade English class cannot distinguish between school writing and everyday speaking. They write like they speak. A lot of my students are African American, and they tend to use Ebonics in their writing. I have been trying to correct their writing errors since the beginning of the school, which was three months ago, but they still continue writing like they are speaking. I talked to the other English teacher at school to see how she deals with this issue if she has it. She said she did not pay attention to the writing errors if students were doing creative writing. I disagree with her. Even in creative writing, students should follow the rules of the language closely. The main problem is almost all of my African American students are failing my class while that is not the case with the other English teacher. Should I reconsider my position on this issue? I feel like my position shows high expectations; but I am not sure any more. Solution: (Rates are posted for this solution!) I think it is important to get students to love writing first. If they are constantly being told that they are wrong, the will become frustrated and might not want to write for you at all. What I would do is let them write how they write for awhile. In the mean time, I would try teaching a few of the rules you are looking to correct in their writing every week. Once it has been taught by you and students have practiced using them, they become accountable for their work. You could even try giving them activities where they have to make corrections to sentences or short papers with grammatical errors. I think that they world of emails and texting has hurt all students in that they end up writing papers in the shorthand that they use for emails and texts. Once they use those as a means of communication for too long, they end up forgetting the rules of grammar, and also forget how to spell properly. I think it will just take some patience and time, but they will get there!                 Rating The suggested solution is respectful of the individual (student) Yes The suggested solution is relevant to the case Yes The suggested solution is reasonable (easy) for the teacher to implement Yes The suggested solution is likely to solve the problem/issue Yes The suggested solution is original Yes Comments: I really like this solution! In some cases, students love to write or talk about their ideas and most of the time they may use "slang" words without realizing. I love the idea of giving them activities where they have to make corrections to sentences or short papers with grammatical errors... This is actually a great practice for them to realize that they may be making mistakes in their own papers. Rated On: March 5, 2017 6:44 am Rated By: uresaM