Just Right or Just Write? Separating Grammar from Content to Inspire Students’ Love for Writing by Emily Malovich

Just Right or Just Write? Separating Grammar from Content to Inspire Students’ Love for Writing 

by Emily Malovich

If there is one thing I vividly remember about writing in school, it’s the red pen. Pages and pages of handwritten or typed work, all of it decorated with red ink to point out the missing comma, the dangling modifier, the unclear antecedent. In classes with one of my favorite college professors, it was a badge of honor to receive a paper back with an entire page free from corrections.

As a student who loved writing, I saw this feedback as an opportunity to grow as a writer. It didn’t take long into my teaching career for me to realize that most of my tenth grade students did not feel the same way. Over time, I began to understand the unintended message I was sending with my red pen, and later, with my Google Classroom comments: your ideas don’t matter if you can’t express them with perfect grammar.

Research about authentic writing instruction supports this perspective: students are more engaged with writing when they feel that expression is valued over conventions. When our feedback predominantly consists of grammatical corrections, it signals that we value mechanics more than our students’ ideas. This introduces a dilemma for writing teachers. We might accept that overemphasizing grammar makes writing less authentic, but we also know that our students need to write clearly and correctly so that others will understand their ideas and take them seriously. How do we strike a balance?

This year, I experimented with strategies to separate grammar assessment from content assessment. Here are some of the methods that I used to make writing experiences more authentic without neglecting grammar instruction:

The Writing Non-Negotiables List

Inspired by this blog post from Dave Stuart, Jr., during the first week of school, I created a “Writing Non-Negotiables List” with my students. The list functions as a grammatical minimum bar for students’ writing. Any submissions that do not meet that bar will be returned without a grade until students make corrections. The list establishes the minimum writing expectations that are acceptable in my class.

Importantly, the list must be generated based on the writing abilities and needs of the students in your class. While I review my students’ first writing task, I identify about five frequent errors that are within their capacity to fix. These are grammatical concepts that they know, but just tend to ignore when they write. The next day, we work together to populate our list and correct mistakes in anonymous student samples. I post the list for students to reference and update it as they progress. At the beginning of tenth grade, our list looked like this:

On my writing rubrics, the criteria for Mechanics reads simply, “There are no errors from the Writing Non-Negotiables list.” If I see these errors, I return the submission so the writer can make corrections and resubmit. With this approach, students know that when I give feedback on their writing, it’s about their ideas and expression, not grammatical perfection. There is a concrete, accessible list of errors for them to correct during proofreading rather than an endless list of possible mistakes to worry about.

However, while the Writing Non-Negotiables List might increase the authenticity of the writing experience and create a very basic level of quality control, it doesn’t really help my students become more grammatically correct writers. To this end, I implement a second strategy.

Writing in Context Quizzes

During each major writing assessment, I assign a Writing in Context Quiz. These quizzes ask students to demonstrate skills from recent grammar units within the writing task. Writing in Context quizzes don’t appear on the rubric and are entered as a completely separate grade. 

I introduce the Writing in Context Quiz early in the writing process, but students have permission to completely ignore it while writing their draft. Then, during the editing process, we revisit the task. Students who completed the quiz tasks as they drafted simply add comments or other annotations to show where they demonstrated the skill; students who needed to focus on their content during drafting can edit their work to complete each task. This strategy challenges students to stretch their abilities and take grammatical risks with their writing, but within a targeted, supported context.

A Work in Progress

As someone whose education took place in the era of the ubiquitous red pen, it has been a process for me to let go of extensive grammatical corrections. I’m still searching for innovative ways to strike a balance between authenticity and mechanics (next year’s experiment: grammar journals!). But despite the effort and trial and error process, I have experienced how separating grammar from content evaluation makes writing more accessible and enjoyable for my students. During the 2024-2025 school year, my students expressed that they felt less like they would be "caught" making a mistake and more capable of exploring their ideas in their writing. For me, that is reason enough to surrender my metaphorical red pen and try a new approach.

Author Bio:

Emily Malovich (she/her) is the new WPCTE blog coordinator. She teaches sophomore English and AP Literature at Sharpsville Area High School in Mercer County. Currently, she is pursuing her D.Ed. in Curriculum and Instruction at IUP. Outside of teaching, her hobbies include the “three B’s”: books, birding, and sourdough bread. Contact her at emalovich@sasdpride.org.