Full Stop or Comma?
After being here for two months, I can safely say that I
have seen student writing at several levels. I have the privilege of teaching
four courses this semester including: Writing and Study Skills, Methods of
Teaching (Y2 and Y3), and English Curriculum and Course Design. I have seen my
fair share of writing. One grammatical problem I have noticed here is that
students do not understand the difference between a full stop and a comma.
Although I could write about the many uses of both punctuation marks, I would
like to focus on the grammatical issue of run-on sentences. Run-on sentences
are two or more independent clauses that are joined together without
appropriate punctuation or conjunction. An independent clause is a group of
words that can stand alone (subject/verb). In many cases, commas are put in
place of a full stop to incorrectly punctuate these sentences. In fact, some of
my students write an entire paragraph and use only one full stop! The best way
to demonstrate these errors is to use examples from student writing. These
examples were taken from my methods classes, years two and three. The bolded
areas in each example are where suggested full stops, commas, or conjunctions
could be placed and in some cases words need to be added. Keep in mind there
are many options to create a correctly written sentence.
“I feel good about my skills of developing this lesson plan and hoping to improve on the weak
areas very soon when I begin to
teach in class, writing a lesson plan will be easy.”
“For this case I chose to teach comprehension and this
forced me to look for passages in the textbook
and after how to break it down to the learners level, the method of how I am going to teach it to the learners to
understand.”
“As a teacher, I randomly choose learners to take on the
teacher’s role in class to explain to fellow learners what they are studying since the learner’s express
themselves in the simplest way of their understanding so that other learners
could easily understand easily when
it’s their fellow teacher teaching them than the teacher.”
“While developing my lesson plan I got a difficulty with my time scope because I felt it was a bit
less for the topic I was going to handle
and I need like eighty (80) minutes to teach that topic very well.”
“The problems in delivering this lesson is shortage of materials for example books like plays,
poetry and poems there is also a
problem of many students in a class thus making it hard to cater for each
student individually.”
In each of these examples, there are at least two or three
separate independent clauses. Again, independent clauses are made to stand
alone. They may also be joined with conjunctions, but as you can plainly see,
students are not using these either. So, students, I implore you to check your
sentences and make sure they only contain one independent clause or are
punctuated correctly. If you need help, there are great resources online as
well as many lecturers around to help you understand the difference between
full stops and commas.
Over the next few issues, I will write a series of articles
on correct comma usage.
