

Unfortunately, they had the unintended effect of marginalizing discussions of sentence structure, word choice, punctuation, and grammatical errors until very late in the writing process. These ideas are still so powerfully present in writing centers today because they are so very true. In fairness to the scholars above, they meant to emphasize that writers should concentrate on developing their ideas before they worried about comma splices, and to emphasize that truly good writing involved the long-term development of a complex set of skills. The writing process was divided, the writing center’s territory was firmly staked, and the perceived needs of multilingual writers were placed squarely outside the parameters of the writing center’s mission, pedagogical philosophy, and standard procedure. The content of students’ essays should be discussed only as much as necessary for accurate error correction.

Unfortunately, multilingual writers have been unfairly denied access to language feedback because of the very strong prohibition against editing, but the good news is that we can still be very helpful without compromising our principles. “Checking the grammar” can feel uncomfortably close to proofreading and editing students’ papers for them-which writing coaches know is strictly out of bounds.

When you ask students writing in English as an additional language what they would like to work on, they will often say that they’d like you to check their grammar. “Just Check My Grammar” What this handout is about
