Education

Hi, I'm a college freshman taking my first philosophy class. My professor takes points off my essay for grammatical mistakes I made. I disagree with this approach. Isn't the idea the most important, more so for philosophy?

Comments

I'm with your prof.

Funny you should ask. It's grading season and I've spent a chunk of my day reading essays by freshmen. Some are pretty well-written; others not so much. I'm with your prof.

If I sent a paper full of bad grammar to a philosophy journal, it would either be rejected or, if it was otherwise worth considering, would be sent back for revision. You can think of either of these as the professional equivalent of getting points knocked off.

But aside from what happens in the profession, I don't see my role as narrowly as you think I should. Part of the point of my essay assignments is to improve their strictly philosophical skills. But I take it to be part of my job to help students learn to write better essays in general. I don't think that this falls only to the writing teachers in the English department; I don't have that sort of siloed view of a university education.

I'd add: experience suggests that ungrammatical prose often goes with careless or even muddled thinking. And it makes it more likely that the reader will misunderstand or (a different matter, but still...) get annoyed and just stop reading.

If it makes you feel any better, if you submitted a paper to me that showed philosophical insight, careful thought, and overall clear expression, I would dock you not at all for a handful of minor grammatical lapses. But if it rose to the point of being annoying, I wouldn't give you as good a grade as I would have if you not only were doing good philosophy but also had produced a better essay.

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And by the way: if I were grading your question, I might suggest that you re-write it, perhaps this way:

Hi, I'm a college freshman taking my first philosophy class. My professor takes points off for grammatical mistakes. I disagree with this approach. Aren't the ideas the most important thing, especially for philosophy?

That way, your reader will pay attention to what you say, and not to lapses in the way you say it.

Grammatical mistakes in a student's paper get in the way when I'm trying to follow what s/he's saying. If you want to persuade someone of something, don't distract them. Bad grammar (and more generally, bad writing) can be very distracting.

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