I recently marked a batch of essays that were written by second year students. These students got at least AAB in their A-levels (two As and a B in three separate subjects). In first year, they got classes on essay-writing and plenty of practice in written composition with the plethora of lab reports they submitted. They were all native speakers of English, as I ascertained when I met them for a tutorial in advance of writing the essay where I brought them through further exercises in structuring an essay argument.
So why can some of them still not string a coherent sentence together?
These were not hand-written essays scrawled under time pressure, for which I am prepared to allow some leeway as even the best of us can make grammatical and spelling slips when racing to beat a clock. Rather, they were typed essays, prepared with all the spellchecking and proofing benefits of a word processor, and some of them were still absolute rubbish.
I offer the following as an example:
In 2001 [Researcher X] investigated weather the effect was right in a new experiment. By using stimuli she had controlled better. He found [the effect] and this proved [Researcher Y]'s (2005) theory was right.
Where should I start? "Weather" is not a conjunction. Effects can't be "right". "By ... better" is a fragment, not a sentence. Researcher X changes sex from one sentence to the next. A 2001 empirical paper disregarded temporal dynamics to prove a 2005 theory correct.
Ye gods!
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