Homo-whats?

After finally grading all my ENG 120 students' first essay revisions (that was a mouthful!), I have a better idea of what their grammatical and structural struggles are. All of them struggle with homophones, just like every other batch of students I've had. They also can't seem to let go of "you" or contractions.

(I do not allow students to use contractions in their academic writing, no do I allow them to write in anything but the third person, except for certain assignments).

On Monday I handed out a contractions practice sheet and had the students pair up. I gave them five minutes and they went through about 20 sentences, finding the contraction, putting the apostrophe in the proper place, and then writing out the long-hand of the contraction.

Ex: Shell make a great wife someday, Id wager. She'll, I'd = she will and I would

They had read Chapter 3: Improving Your Paragraph Skills in The Confident Writer, so we also focused on creating topic sentences.

Using the example topic of "College Students on Spring Break," I showed the class how to narrow the topic.

In this case, I narrowed the topic to: College Students Drinking Excessively on Spring Break.

I then created a thesis statement: College students who drink excessively on Spring Break are put themselves in danger of health problems, physical harm, and risky sexual behavior.

As my students already know, the three main points in a thesis statement translate to the topics for the three body paragraphs; in this case:

1. Excessive drinking can cause health problems such as alcohol poisoning in college students.
2. When a person is drunk, his reasoning faculties are impaired and he is more likely to cause physical harm to himself through thoughtless action.
3. Impaired decision-making capability is another side effect of excessive drinking, making students more likely to engage in unprotected or risky sex.

I then split the class into little groups of three people. The groups chose from 6 broad topics (cell phones, reality tv, roommates, addictive behavior, etc.), narrow the topics, create a thesis statement, and at least one topic sentence. Each group then shared what it thought was its best topic/narrow topic/TS/topic sentence set.

This morning in my 10:00am class, instead of a quiz, I handed out a sheet with 18 sentences. Each sentence needed a word that is a homophone and the students had to choose which homophone was correct (Ex: Can you ____ that carrot for me? Pare / Pair / Pear). I allowed the students to work in pairs (no pun intended!) and asked them to come up with 10 'sets' of homophones when they finished the sentences. We then wrote the most unique of the sets of homophones on the board and discussed them.

Ex:
die and dye
cent, scent and sent
way and weight
threw and through
lye and lie
light versus lite (I explained that "lite" is a pop word, as in Miller Lite (c), but that "light" is actually the correct homonym for a light-bulb or something that does not weigh much).
rain and reign
lane and lain
heir and air
boy and buoy (and boi)

and oodles more.