The purpose of this mixed methods action research project was to address the problem of practice of incorporating foundational grammar, spelling, and punctuation (GSP) instruction into community college journalism classes through the intervention of online interactive modules called The Story Mechanics Project (SMP). The modules were developed and…

This study examines the nature of metalinguistic awareness in first-year college writers enrolled in two-year degree programs, corequisite support courses, or both. Metalinguistic awareness is an ability to systematize knowledge about language and use that knowledge to monitor language as language. Participants in the study completed reading…

The authors in this study used a pre-posttest experimental design with random assignment to treatment or control group to assess the use of an electronic editing cognitive strategy. The participants were 16 college students with intellectual and developmental disabilities enrolled in a 2-year postsecondary program at a Midwestern institute of…

Nobody wants to be here. In remedial English, earning no credit, stuck. Now--after months of commas, clauses, and four-paragraph essays--students have one last chance to write their way out. Twenty students sit at computers, poised to start the final in-class essay for English 002 at Montgomery College. Anybody can enroll here, and all kinds do.…

In this article, the author offers her experience of modeling mistakes and writing spontaneously in the computer classroom to get students' attention and elicit their editorial response. She describes how she taught her class about major sentence errors--comma splices, run-ons, and fragments--through her Sentence Meditation exercise, a rendition…

In this paper, the author explains the simplification of a theory of punctuation for college-level instruction. He describes a systematization of the punctuation marks that has pedagogical possibilities. He concludes by stressing that the notion of a hierarchy of punctuation marks is not a difficult one for college students; after all, the…