Transcript Lesson 23 Essentials Video: Grammar

CARA: Because when you're writing an academic paper, you want to use the standard language so that the only thing that's coming across is your ideas, and that's the focus. And you're not distracted by slang or by things that really are far outside of the norm.

CONNOR: The resources are out there to, like, you know, make sure that you're saying something correctly, and make sure you're spelling something correctly. So I don't really worry about that too much, whereas an argument's more abstract, and you can't be taught, like, this is how you argue your point, because, I mean, that would mean someone had already written your paper.

NICOLE: There are mistakes that I'm always working on with grammar, and I do find that I struggle with grammar. I mean, there are grammatical facts that I do know, and I understand, and I can explain them to another person, but then I find that there's a lot of grammar and mechanics that I have internalized in a way where I'm doing it correctly, but I can't tell you what I'm doing because I don't know, it's just internalized.

GRETCHEN: Writing on a computer is faster, and it checks some mistakes, but sometimes it checks your mistakes incorrectly.

VINH-THUY: So I feel like mechanical correctness and just punctuation, in general, play such an important role in writing an essay. And whenever I write an essay, the main thing that I usually have the editor look is just do you see any repeating grammatical mistakes, because I do make them. And I sometimes don't put a comma, or I'll sometimes forget to conjugate a word correctly. And I know that sounds weird in the English language because we only have two forms of conjugation for most verbs in the present tense, but sometimes I'll miss that.

HUSSAIN: I don't have so much problem with spelling or grammar. I have a lot more problems with, I would say, like, punctuation stuff, or ways I could improve my punctuation. I'm not using stuff correctly. So if I go sentence by sentence, because punctuation is such a big thing, then I can improve most of that before I actually turn it in.

KENDAL: I mean, if you make one or two mistakes, you're not going to fail the paper. So I've started to not be as stressed out, whereas the red pen used to scare me. You know, red pen marks all over your paper. And now it helps me, OK, well, this is where I need to work on, and this is where I need to develop ideas, and this is where I need to edit my paper a little bit more. I think that it's all a learning experience, and that hopefully, if nothing, if you've gotten a bad grade, then you can at least go back and be like, OK, well now I see where I made a mistake, and I won't be doing that in the future.