Why Proofreading is Important

This semester began my two-year stint as a Graduate Assistant at a University where I will be teaching two Composition 1 classes while taking two or three of my own Graduate courses for a Masters of Arts in English. Recently my students turned in their second paper for the course--a definition paper. They had about a week and a half to two weeks to write their first paper (depending on how industrious they were at starting early) with tutorials during the drafting process.

For the second paper, the students had about a week to write the paper. It is not going to be formally graded, but rather taken as pass/fail with the opportunity to rewrite either it or the first paper for their third assignment. There was a peer review day but no tutorials this time around. I expected these papers to be shorter, less in-depth, and certainly much less polished. However, here are a few sentences that would alert any teacher of a lack of proofreading on the students' part. I'm hoping that during later tutorials and during class to use examples such as these to remind students that proofreading is NECESSARY. But in the meantime, I'll use them as opportunities to take a break and laugh. Although I certainly do not want to laugh at my students, I think you'll agree that these sentences are fair game. Besides, if I don't see the lighter side of this I'm going to get depressed that my students were too lazy to catch these. (On a side note, most of them during tutorials to prepare for their rewrite did admit that these papers were not their best work and that many of their sentences needed MAJOR work). All sentences are reproduced, with no corrections, to the best of my ability.

This student started out defining the word "legit" (not exactly what I was looking for, but fair game I guess) but then sort of moved on to slang. Here is my favorite sentence of the whole batch:

"The words LOL meaning laugh out loud, legit meaning legitimate or even the word sick which most people see the word sick they think when they say sick the literally mean sick but they are actually meaning something is cool or awesome, in modern days people would even go to say it is legit."

Hubs and I laughed over that one all during lunch after I showed it to him. Another great one from that paper:

"When someone says 'That sign was legit and colorful' the best was to say that would have been 'The sign was really colorful.' Statement done no confusion no misunderstandings it was blunt and straight and to the point."

I'm going to start using that when I say something and people ask me to rephrase or repeat what I just said: "Statement done no confusion no misunderstandings . . . ."

Someone else quoted a well known phrase:

"[A lot of people say] 'does what you love and love what you do.'"

I just don't see how he couldn't hear that something was wrong there when he wrote it. Just a couple more before I go:

"And I question this definition that many people define the word with."

"Peace can be as something as big as war or small as doing the right thing, or being nice to the people around you."

"The economy lies to people all the time, and most people don't even realize it."

"Freedom is a vague term with no indefinite definition."