Bomillft
New member
- Joined
- Jul 10, 2020
- Member Type
- Other
- Native Language
- English
- Home Country
- United States
- Current Location
- United States
Hey everyone, I'm posting here today because I'm trying to help my roommate improve his writing. I'm a native English speaker and he's from Bangladesh, and I can tell right now that I have my work cut out for me. I want to be up front here, I'm not a trained ESL instructor, and he would probably be better off going to a skilled teacher, but he really can't afford that so I'm the best he can do.
One problem that I'm having is that there are mistakes in the syntax of his sentences that I readily notice but that he doesn't seem to pick up on. I want to help coach him when I find such errors, but it's difficult for me to do so because these mistakes are usually things that I just pick up on intuitively without thinking much about them, and coaching my roommate is forcing me to think about and articulate on why these mistakes are actually mistakes. My temptation is to simply step in and edit the sentence for him and say, 'this is a more appropriate way of expressing that thought' but if I do that he'll never come to understand the underlying principles that lead me to that conclusion; doing that would simply serve as a purely cosmetic solution to a deeper-running issue.
Anyways, here are some examples of such sentences that I've come across in his writing:
Example 1: [In our last tutoring session], we discussed <why> the term "accurately" was a poor [word] choice in my writing.
The material in square brackets is stuff that I added for context, but my main issue is that he omitted the word 'why' when he wrote the sentence, and because he did that, the sentence's syntax is incorrect. I need to be able to explain the principles to him that make it so.
Example 2: In the sentence where I wrote 'accurately', <my use of the word> was not appropriate because 'accurately'... is best used to describe something attempting to remain true to a standard or hit a target.
Here, he seems to be missing anything akin to the subject I've included in the angle brackets, which makes it so the part of the sentence 'was not appropriate' doesn't actually point to anything.
Any suggestions?
One problem that I'm having is that there are mistakes in the syntax of his sentences that I readily notice but that he doesn't seem to pick up on. I want to help coach him when I find such errors, but it's difficult for me to do so because these mistakes are usually things that I just pick up on intuitively without thinking much about them, and coaching my roommate is forcing me to think about and articulate on why these mistakes are actually mistakes. My temptation is to simply step in and edit the sentence for him and say, 'this is a more appropriate way of expressing that thought' but if I do that he'll never come to understand the underlying principles that lead me to that conclusion; doing that would simply serve as a purely cosmetic solution to a deeper-running issue.
Anyways, here are some examples of such sentences that I've come across in his writing:
Example 1: [In our last tutoring session], we discussed <why> the term "accurately" was a poor [word] choice in my writing.
The material in square brackets is stuff that I added for context, but my main issue is that he omitted the word 'why' when he wrote the sentence, and because he did that, the sentence's syntax is incorrect. I need to be able to explain the principles to him that make it so.
Example 2: In the sentence where I wrote 'accurately', <my use of the word> was not appropriate because 'accurately'... is best used to describe something attempting to remain true to a standard or hit a target.
Here, he seems to be missing anything akin to the subject I've included in the angle brackets, which makes it so the part of the sentence 'was not appropriate' doesn't actually point to anything.
Any suggestions?
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