“Mistakes Are a Fact of Life”: A National Comparative Study

BY ANDREA A. LUNSFORD AND KAREN J. LUNSFORD

Mistakes are a fact of life. It is the response to the error that counts.

—NIKKI GIOVANNI, Black Feeling, Black Talk, Black Judgment

Fernando Sanchez: To an older audience, this is a good reference. To a much younger audience reading and researching this, “Bushisms” might not be a word in their vocabulary.

Sarah Lum: Perhaps text message lingo is not the main problem of student writing; rather it is the subjects students are currently interested in. They are reading less formal texts and are more engaged in social media. In the past, I read an essay in which a student had quoted the lyrics of a rapper rather than an author.

Perhaps it is the seemingly endless string of what have come to be called “Bushisms” (“We shouldn’t fear a world that is more interacted”) and the complex response to them from both right and left. Perhaps it is the hype over Instant Messaging lingo cropping up in formal writing and the debate among teachers over how to respond (Farmer 48). Perhaps it is the long series of attempts to loosen the grip of “standard” English on the public imagination, from the 1974 special issue of College Composition and Communication (Students’ Right to Their Own Language) to a 2006 special issue of College English devoted to Cross-Language Relations in Composition. Or perhaps it is the number of recent reports, many of them commissioned by the government, that have bemoaned the state of student literacy and focused attention on what they deem significant failures at the college level (see especially the recent reports from the Spellings Commission and Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges).

Whatever the reasons, and they are surely complex and multilayered, forms of language use have been much in the news, with charges of what student writers can and cannot (or should and should not) do all around us. The times seemed ripe, then, for taking a close look at a national sample of student writing to see what it might tell us about the current state of affairs. With that goal in mind, we drew up plans to conduct a national study of first-year college student writing and to compare our findings to those of a similar study conducted over twenty years ago.

“The Frequency of Formal Errors,” or Remembering Ma and Pa Kettle

FS: This article will contain much content that older readers are already familiar with. It also includes phrases like “for now, flash back to the mid-1980s,” implying the audience can easily remember those times.

SL: As frequent as misspelling is, I would expect that percentage to decrease in this age because we rely on computers to autocorrect our mistakes.

But we are getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. For now, flash back to the mid-1980s. Some readers may remember receiving a letter from Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford asking them to participate in a national study of student writing by submitting a set of marked student papers from a first-year composition course. That call brought in well over 21,000 papers from 300 teachers around the country, and in fairly short order Andrea and Bob drew a random sample of 3,000 student papers stratified to be representative in terms of region of the country, size of institution, and type of institution. While they later analyzed patterns of teacher response to the essays as well as the particular spelling patterns that emerged (in that study, spelling was the most frequent student mistake by some 300 percent), they turned first to an analysis of which formal errors (other than spelling) were most common in this sample of student writing.

Why the focus on error in the Lunsford and Connors study? Bob and Andrea’s historical research had led each of them to caches of student papers with teacher comments focusing on errors that sometimes seemed very out of date if not downright odd (“stringy” syntax, for example, or obsessive comments on how to distinguish between the use of “shall” and “will”), and they wondered what teachers in the 1980s would focus on instead. In addition, the 1938–39 research into student patterns of formal error carried out by John C. Hodges, author of the Harbrace Handbook of English, piqued their curiosity—and led to a review of earlier studies. As Connors and Lunsford put it:

As Connors and Lunsford noted, Hodges did not publish any results of his study in contemporary journals, though in a footnote to the preface of the first edition of his Handbook, he did list the top ten errors he found. Connors and Lunsford’s research turned up two other “top ten” lists, one by Roy Ivan Johnson in 1917, the other by Paul Witty and Roberta Green in 1930. The three lists are presented in Table 1.2.

[Table 1: Historical Top Ten Errors Lists appeared here.]

Increasingly intrigued to see how formal error patterns might have shifted in the sixty-odd years since these earlier research reports, Connors and Lunsford set out to discover the most common patterns of student errors characteristic of the mid-1980s and which of those patterns were marked most consistently by teachers. Table 2 presents their findings.

[Table 2: Connors and Lunsford List of Most Frequent Formal Errors appeared here.]

SL: Some teachers are more lenient and some are more constructive—students learn most from constructive criticism.

FS: What is that popular stereotype?

As noted above, Table 2 omits spelling errors, which constituted such a large number of the formal errors that Andrea and Bob decided to study them separately (see “Exercising Demonolatry”). In analyzing the other most frequent patterns of formal error and teacher marking of them, Bob and Andrea drew some intriguing conclusions: First, teachers vary widely in their thinking about what constitutes a “markable” error. Second, teachers do not mark as many errors as the popular stereotype might have us believe, perhaps because of the difficulty of explaining the error or because the teacher is focusing on only a few errors at any one time. Finally, they concluded that error patterns had indeed shifted since the time of Hodges’s Harbrace Handbook, especially in terms of a “proliferation of error patterns that seem to suggest declining familiarity with the visual look of a written page” (406).

FS: Good wording to keep the reader’s mind on the idea of mistakes being a fact of life!

While Andrea and Bob found errors aplenty in the 3,000 papers from 1984, they also found reason for optimism:

Table 3 presents their comparison of the findings of the three studies.

[Table 3: Comparison of Three Studies’ Findings appeared here.]

FS: Although I did not know about the Lunsford and Connors study in 1984, this first section really gave me a good summary and base to start to understand the statistics and studies of today.

SL: Since this is a scholarly article, I expected it to be hard to read and understand, but it is pretty clear so far.

Given the consistency of these numbers, Connors and Lunsford concluded that “although the length of the average paper demanded in freshman composition has been steadily rising, the formal skills of students have not declined precipitously” (406). . . .