Context
The assignment was to explain the difference between being convicted for civil disobedience and an act of crime. The students, children of Spanish influence, gave three similar responses as far as understanding of the terminology goes (appositives). In the first text, the student knows about possessive apostrophes, but appears to confuse it with plural. “Other time’s person chooses…” There is great variety in the writing style of the three. While the first does a great job experimenting with different sentence types while making more mistakes, the second two are more straightforward. They have few mistakes in their papers; however, their sentences follow a simple and/or compound pattern.
Analysis
In the first two paragraphs, the student uses a mix of compound and simple sentences. However, in last three, the vast majority of sentences are simple and shorter. In the third paragraph, the student writes three consecutive simple sentences “The law interferes with Chris’s usual jog at 9:30pm. Chris figures he will jog in the park anyway. He knows the consequence could be a ticket”. Reading and underlining, I noticed how the sentences differ in the first two compared to the last three (participles). I see two potential reasons for this. The student received feedback from his teacher after writing the first two paragraphs and made some changes to vary the sentence pattern. The other reason could be that the student is afraid of making mistakes, possibly because the teacher dots points for incorrect writing.
The student demonstrates an ability to use different sentence types. “Although in these two cases they were both breaking the law, they had two different points of view”, is an example of a complex sentence. Further, later in the text, the student writes a compound-complex sentence: “Beth decided to break in to a store with a knife and stills the money from the cash register because she was low on cash”.
Question:
Is the first paragraph somewhere close to the context part of the assignment? I plan to add examples illustrating how the students are Spanish influenced. Further, have I described rather than prescribed the material provided?
Does my participle brushstroke fit in with the rest of the paragraph?
Paul,
ReplyDeleteYou do have nice exaamples of participles and appositives. However, I also see your point about whether or not the participles "fit." The rest of the paragraph is very technical, and participles are one brustroke because they usually add more (non-technical) imagery to the writing. You can leave it, but I would personally cut the participle to keep a more consistent tone--or see what else you might change so that the participle does fit.