Last week Mrs. Sandy sent a file to me in Google Drive containing essays written by students in our 1st hour 10th grade regular English class. The night that I received them, I skimmed through them, expecting some grammatical and spelling errors, but nothing too bad. What I saw, however, exceeded my expectation. When looking through the essays, I saw that one student had underlined his entire essay; another student wrote his essay in such a way that it looked like he had never used a tab button; yet another student had so many spelling errors I wondered how she had made it this far. Needless to say, I was very worried about going in and grading these essays.
A couple of days after sending me the file of essays, Mrs. Sandy and I co-led a day of revision and editing of these essays. The students spent the last have of class and about fifteen minutes of the next day's class revising and editing their essays. She had them review the grammar notes they had taken a couple of days before, and go through their essays and make any corrections they saw necessary that paralleled with their notes. Finally, Mrs. Sandy had them use spell check on their documents. In the end, this helped their papers dramatically.
Two nights ago I began grading these essays. Surprisingly enough, the couple of half days they used to edit their papers paid off. The best help they received was that from spell check. Even though it is not genuine spelling help, it saved many of their grades. After grading about half of them so far, I am very surprised at their edits on their papers, and the good those edits have done. Not to say that they don't have any mistakes, but that is natural; we all make mistakes. Even English majors. I look forward to seeing further improvement in their writing.
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