So. February pretty much flew by. In an effort to write at least one post a month, here I am to ramble about something that’s been on my mind lately: grammar and spelling corrections.
The end of this month marks a year since I started evaluating essays written by ESL learners. I’ve been working in this industry for about 5 years now, so I’ve had my fair share of grading and marking, but this specific role involves written assignments composed by professional adults. Unlike conversation classes, perfect grammar and spelling are of the utmost importance since most of these individuals are required to write emails and attend meetings on a corporate level. I really do love editing (when it’s not my own work LOL) because it’s like solving a puzzle. Every submitted essay is a scramble of words and phrases that I have to rearrange to reveal a correct answer.
Something else I enjoy is grading tests and marking papers. Whenever I played “school” as a kid, my favorite part was making tests for my sisters or cousins and grading them. One of the fond memories of my youth is of my uncle bringing home a bunch of journals from his grade 6 homeroom class for marking. I was maybe 9 or 10 at the time, and I remember taking a red pen and correcting one of the entries myself. (I had to stop because my writing didn’t match his.)
Most of my teaching colleagues in the past have hated this and I always got the same vibe from my teachers when I was a student. Teaching is a job that demands endless prep sessions and offers barely any free time, but I never viewed correcting assignments as a chore. To me, it was a way to relax and enjoy any downtime. While I took a brief break from teaching in 2020, I often joked around about how I wished there was a mobile game in which the player just corrected incorrect grammar and/or spelling of poorly written sentences. Yes, I was basically describing a grading simulator. I constantly hinted at my then-boyfriend-now-husband to code a program that could function as such. Fortune smiled down upon me a few months later when the language institute I was working for offered a side-gig that consisted of marking essays. It was a dream come true!!
But sometimes it feels like the process of doling out these corrections is frying my brain–at least the creative side of it. It wasn’t until I started teaching ESL that I realized how much I took the English language for granted. It seems weird to say that I never put much thought into writing, but what I mean is that I never mulled over perfect sentence structure or grammar. Rules still exist to some degree in creative writing, of course, but it’s pretty much a free-for-all.
With that said, I really hope that I’ll be able to fully dive back into creative writing next month. Last June and November, I churned out a decent amount of chapters for two of my WIPs. We’ll see what happens in March.