“Frequency of Formal Errors in Current College Writing, or Ma an Pa Kettle Do Research"

Interesting stuff in this article related to how teachers viewed errors in student papers. The authors actually collected a wide range of papers that were marked by teachers and tallied up the kinds of errors that they annotated. There is also an interesting background to all of this that raises many questions about the social construction of error: Are the errors commonly cited in student writing today the same as the kinds of errors cited 50 years ago? It turns out that there isn’t much research on the large-scale analysis side of student mistakes. The first such project was done by John C. Hodges in the late 1930s. What’s interesting is noting the kinds of errors patterns prevalent in that study. The first on the list was “comma” followed by “spelling.” Now however, because of the lack of familiarity of the written page and the shift of print from book form to digital forms the frequency of spelling mistakes according to the authors, have gone up. However, there is a light at the end of the tunnel. Students aren’t actually making more mistakes than they used to. This is reassuring because even though the media and other forms of authoritative figures keep insisting on the dumbing down of 21st century students that this is actually not true.