This is a very interesting and important discussion. Such a correction is so essential for everyone. Is not it?

As the header of this thread has always suggested, you need to be a real nit to be here at all.

I should post some sample sentences from my college students for you guys...

Just checking in.

And you can check out any time you like, but ...

That's a genre unto itself ...

Here's the opening sentence of a paper I'm grading:

Overall watching this film, it was definitely a drag for me how it opens with people walking and catching the scenery more than focusing on telling me what the background history of Cambodia or what the film was going to be about; the film quickly escalated into an action by separating the people and at times the viewer gets the idea that a specific person was executed and this was expected but not to the extent of those tragedies that are to come.

I mean...wtf am I supposed to do with that?

Add some commas?

I liked taking these sorts of sentences and reducing the length by 75%. But that only works in class. About all I can manage while grading is "Huh?"

that was one of the shortest sentences in the paper

This is excusable because students are taught from kindergarten until 12th grade or whenever they actually graduated that they have to abide by arbitrary word counts and this means that they end up with bad verbiage habits that are ultimately hard to break without a lot of education and you as a teacher have to make sure that the bucking trend of filler words stops at your desk so the students can divide themselves into those that get it and end up working as line cooks and those that don't get it end up working in corporate America, probably in marketing but maybe some of those kids who hate writing a lot of words can just work at Hallmark writing Christmas cards or even work at a company that specializes in writing online memes.

I think a valuable class would be called Writing Memos." The punchline at the end is: "all your writing should be like this!"

What grade did you end up giving this magnificent specimen of writing?

No. People who try to inflate word counts just add a bunch of pointless sentences and words that don't actually add to the meaning. If that is their only problem, then they do so using good grammar and syntax. Rambling on in proper English is an entirely different problem from just writing poorly and also using a lot of words in the process.

Maybe you can excuse the rambling, but writing like something Google Translate spit out is a different problem entirely.

Periodic periods are strongly encouraged.

Periods and commas alone can't fix that.

What level is this? I mean, the obvious answer is "fail them".

It's ENG 101...freshman English. So, it's okay that they're bad...it's just annoying because this is her fourth and final paper. I don't have word counts, but I have page counts. So they have to write, say, 4-5 pages, but not a strict word count. This stops me from having to read extra blather.

I gave her a 65...passing, but needs lots of work. The content was decent - it was just wrapped in crap writing.

And I have a few rules that I harp on throughout the semester:

Strive for two things in your writing: be concise and be clear.
Never use the 2nd person in an academic paper.
Stop using "very," "really," and "extremely" as modifiers.

And I go from there.

For some reason, they all keep confusing prepositions. They use them, bizarrely, interchangeably.

When they are allowed to write in the first person, there are a lot of "Personally," "In my opinion," and "I think."

I torture them until they stop doing that.

I blame drugs

Thoughts on contractions in academic papers?

I'm fine with them as long as it's not ridiculous, like "shouldnt've."

*shouldn't've

I ran in to that pet peeve for my first time this semester. And I'm a PhD student who also spent four years teaching at a university.

Or worse, they could have written "shouldn't of" or "should of", both of which I have seen printed in novels by top publishing houses.

I emailed one author about this and his response was "that's how they talk." I told him no, that's just how it sounds to you when they say the contraction for "should HAVE", but that definitely is not how it is spelled. He did not reply.

I understand there is some phonetic leeway accepted with dialogue, but not this.

I suppose, but there are levels of bad. I'd imagine, you should at least expect them to write at a high-school level. If it's worse than that, it should not be OK.