<p>I’ve read far worse, too - particularly my youngest daughter’s first drafts :rolleyes:. I’ve often wondered how a child who is an avid reader and has grown up hearing proper grammar (or a fair approximation of it) could possibly WRITE like that! Really, if you read for several hours each day (even if it IS Stephen King), why can’t you tell when you are writing an incomplete sentence or changing tenses midstream?</p>
<p>Our school system’s writing curriculum bewilders me. There are all kinds of papers - critical lens papers, response papers, thesis papers, etc. (Whatever happened to book reports?) My d could tell you in detail about each of these, but she still has difficulty constructing a clear complex sentence. She has excellent insights, organizes paragraphs well, and advances her central argument with each sentence, but it’s a rare sentence that doesn’t contain at least one error. My husband pegged her as a big-picture person when she was still a baby, so perhaps I should be thankful that she writes as well as she does.</p>
<p>Elementary education probably gives writing short shrift, with so much pressure on to be certain that young kids are on grade level with reading and math skills. My oldest d is a wonderful writer, and I’ve always thought her 3rd grade teacher deserved most of the credit. She was called out of retirement to replace another teacher at the very last minute, and told the principal she’d only return if she could teach her own writing curriculum. Instead of the math-centric classroom other kids in the district experienced, my daughter was immersed in writing all day, every day. This is in distinct contrast to my youngest daughter’s experience in a 9th grade honors English class, in which four essays were assigned per marking period, and the teacher (now gone, fortunately) had the kids select ONE of them for her to grade!</p>