Why do we work on the more sophisticated aspects of argument and idea development when the students are still struggling to create coherent sentences?
Often students are quite able to correct grammar and style issues in their peers’ writing, but find such issues harder to see in their own writing because they’re struggling to adopt the academy’s language to express their own ideas. The more confident they become as thinkers and manipulators of academic writing, the easier they’ll find it to identify simpler errors of mechanics and style in their writing – the kind of mistakes that they don’t make when writing letters or other familiar writing tasks. Group conferencing is tremendously helpful to students in learning to identify their own mechanical and stylistic errors, because they learn to recognize these errors in their peers’ writing and hear them identified in their own writing.
