10 Tips to Help Students with their Grammar

1. The goal is to help students be good independent self-editors.  Don’t just edit the student’s paper, but teach the student how to edit his/her own paper.
2. Work with the student to get a list of common errors s/he makes, and help him/her develop a list of strategies and techniques to proofread for those errors.
3. Help students come up with a list of internal questions s/he should ask him/herself while editing.
4. Edit in cycles, checking for one grammar point at a time.
5. One good technique for ear learners or ESL learners who have studied English long enough to have some linguistic instincts: read the paper out loud, sentence by sentence, slowly, paying attention to where reading difficulties occur.
6.  Focus on global errors first (errors that affect meaning) and local errors after (errors that don’t effect meaning).
7. Know the difference between an error, which might be systematic and consistently made by the student, and a mistake, which student might make because s/he is paying more attention to expressing complicated ideas.
8. In my experience, everyone, no matter what their linguistic background, make the following errors: run-ons/comma splices, parallel structure, and errors with focus.
9. Edit grammar throughout the writing process, not just at the end.
10. Remember that learning to edit is a long and variable process.