Helping Students Address Errors

This guide addresses error pattern analysis to help students with editing and proofreading their own papers. Most often, you'll use this technique with speakers/writers of English as a second language, but you can use the techniques with any students who have multiple errors in a paper they need to edit. Depending on the student (native speaker or non-native speaker, experienced or inexperienced writer), you'll need to adapt how you use the results of your analysis.

The analysis itself is fairly straightforward and falls into distinct stages:

• Initial error marking
• Checking error marking
• Clustering errors into patterns
• Ranking errors to edit
• Highlighting a particular error
• Determining patterns of errors
• Second level ranking of errors

Finally! Working with the student

• Evaluate the student's ability to recognize the most disruptive error
• Start with basic explanations and move to error correction
• Important Caveat
• Teaching Tips