I don't know the technical grammatical terms for the vast majority of what I read. Heck, it took me till more than halfway through the chapter before I remembered what “inflections” were. Modal auxiliaries? What? Let's not even mention the bewildering array of verb tenses that Standard Written English (SWE) has and the names for each. Past, present, future; these I get. I vaguely remember participles. The perfect tense? All I remembered was a quote from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy—something about there being no future perfect since it isn't. Add the vaguely medical sounding subjunctive and I was totally lost. Then I thought about it; I have B.A. in English. How confusing would this all be to some poor freshman that gets a huge pile of terms dumped on him without any consideration of prior knowledge or lack thereof? If it's Basic Writing, let's get truly basic. Shaughnessy did not disappoint. She went all the way down to an explanatory session on the sentence itself. This works, this is grammatical analysis that's both graspable and useful in getting people to see their writing as both content (message) and form (correctness). The sentence expansion exercise was brilliant and even seems like it could be fun. By nailing the big four concepts of sentence, inflections, tense and agreement she gives the starter tool kit; it won't immediately fix errors, but it will give students something to work with when they proofread. Otherwise, “Proofread!” written in a margin might as well say “Find something, but I'm not going to tell you what. Good luck!”
In discussing expectations, I was reminded of those irritating meta-writing memos we had to do in the CAWP ISI. In consciously thinking about our process and then describing it in writing, we were forced to get away from guessing at how and why we did what we did. The same may hold even more true for errors. If a student can tell me why they wrote it a certain way, that's a huge leap from “I dunno.” Thankfully, Shaughnessy has done a lot of the work on possible reasons for why when “I dunno” is the honest answer from a student writer. I doubt I could keep all the different possible reasons at hand in my memory and that's exactly why reference books exist. I don't need to. I can look it up, much like giving handout references can help the student during the final editing process, when the errors are hopefully removed from the piece. The other thing about expectations is this: if we set the standard, then expect it to be resisted, challenged, moaned about, but actually shot for and possibly even met. Getting past the errors lets the overtaxed brainspace get used for composing instead of just correcting.
I know this is already somewhat lengthy, and to quote Dennis Miller, “I don't wanna go off on a rant here, but...” Errors are mistakes, not lack of intelligence or even ability (maybe training). Everyone, even I, make mistakes when we are challenged or overloaded or irritatted irritated. When my head is full of ideas or it's 5 a.m. or I can't think about anything except how horrible I feel because of what happened at that party I will very likely screw up some things on a paper DRAFT or forget my keys until I'm standing next to my locked car in the rain. This doesn't mean I don't know how to grab my keys or put a comma in the right place, and it's just silly that anyone would assume the latter while denying the former.
