Dora Part 1

Emily Neeleman

Monroe

ENG 326.01

September 2, 2013

"Dora Learns to Write and in the Process Encounters Punctuation"

            I recently applied for a job at the writing center here on campus. We had a workshop last week that covered some of the basics of being a tutor and evaluating someone’s writing. One fundamental they emphasized is leading the writer in the right direction, rather than telling them exactly what to do. If we told the writers what to do, they could never apply the rule by themselves in an effective way. Dora’s teacher applies this same concept when teaching her how to correctly use periods. She does not simply tell Dora the rule of periods and expect her to automatically apply that rule in her writing. Instead, she allows Dora to struggle a little bit while she plays around with period placement. The class has to work through their own writing because it's theirs; she does not try and fix their writing for them. She also has Dora read aloud what she thinks the story should sound like. I think this is a very effective way to teach period placement; Dora naturally heard the syntax in her writing when she strategically dropped her voice at the end of a clause. While this was not the correct place for a period, she was beginning to understand where periods go through sounds. The writing was easier to read because of its correct punctuation. This is another tactic we employ in the writing center; often times we ask the tutees if we can read their work aloud. This way, they can easier identify the mistakes in their writing because as writers and readers, we are better at identification with hearing because we are used to reading other people’s writing and how grammar should sound. The writers who come into the writing center, whose writing steadily improves, also feel more confident when they're inserting the punctuation themselves. 

            One thing Dora’s teacher does not do, however, is point out Dora’s glaring mistakes. I think there is a fine line between telling the student what to do and making sure to snub out reoccurring errors before they become habit. After Dora was wavering between putting periods at the end of a page or line, she decided to put them at the end of a line again. Making this decision, because no one was there to tell her both forms are wrong, affirmed her belief that periods go at the end of a line when they in fact do not. If Dora’s teacher had told Dora point blank earlier that periods do not go at the end of a line, Dora wouldn’t have had to make that decision and thus affirm her belief that they go at the end of a line. Doing so made learning the syntactic rules of period more difficult for her because she was still caught up in the notion that periods have a very specific place where they go every time. While Dora’s teacher was right to let Dora explore a bit when deciding where to place her periods, I do gnot think she should have allowed Dora to create a steadfast rule for herself, because I remember false student-created rules to be the hardest habits to break.

            Exploring different hypotheses is the reason it took Dora so long to understand period placement. Like most children her age, Dora explored different placement of periods without much instruction on what was absolutely wrong. Dora had to go through all the phases of where to place a period and understand how they are wrong before figuring out where the right place is to put a period. Additionally, Dora also had the added complexity of spelling and forming and separating words from phrases. Dora often became confused and tired of all the work she had to do to become an adequate writer. In the end, her exploration is what helped her to understand the syntactic rules of period placement, but not without a lot of work and dedication.