September 28, 2006
Need grammar advice? Now you can ‘Ask Betty’
Beginning this quarter, when UW students have a grammar question, they can ask Betty. Not a real person named Betty, but a Web site called Ask Betty, with some real people behind it.
Ask Betty came about through a $10,000 gift to the English Department from UW alum Mike Jeffers, who wanted to honor his late mother, Betty. Betty was quite the grammarian, Jeffers said at the time of the gift. “She would correct anyone, anywhere. She simply couldn’t help herself. If my brother or I brought a friend home and that friend made a grammatical error, my mother might not remember the friend’s name years later, but she’d remember the specific grammatical error.”
So Jeffers asked then-Chair of the English Deparment Dick Dunn to use his donation to create a Web site about grammar. And this summer two graduate students — Krisda Chaemsaithong and Daniel Griesbach— were hired to make that vision a reality.
“We were told in the beginning that there should be a question-and-answer section and a section with links to other online resources,” Griesbach said. “But when the two of us brainstormed what the site should look like, we ended up adding two sections.”
The two sections are called “Grammar in College Writing” and “Instructor Margin Comments.” In the former, the two discuss what they say are “the 10 most problematic areas for college writers.” Griesbach and Chaemsaithong know something about that because they’ve each taught composition classes for several years. Moreover, the English Department’s Expository Writing Program has an archive of student papers they were able to consult.
Some of the 10 topics include cohesion, dangling modifiers and pronoun use, and the examples given for each are taken from real student papers.
“We didn’t want to talk about grammar just as a set of prescriptive rules,” Chaemsaithong said. “We were trying to get at the rhetorical purposes of grammar, and to encourage students to think about grammar as choices, rather than as fixed rules to follow blindly. Establishing cohesion, for example, affects the strength of your essay’s argument.”
The two also added a special section for the most common grammatical problems faced by students for whom English is a second language.
The “Instructor Margin Comments” section is an attempt to help students understand what instructor comments on their papers mean. Instructors, they say, often use terms such as “comma splice” that students are not familiar with, and terms vary from one instructor to another. So the Instructor Margin Comments section shows actual portions of student papers with the instructors’ comments on them, then goes on to explain what the comments mean.
“With a lot of grammar resources on the Web, or even in handbooks, you have to know the name of the problem you’re trying to identify in order to find it,” Griesbach said. “So we asked ourselves, how do students encounter their own grammar, and one major way is in margin comments.”
Ask Betty does include a Q&A section so that students will be able to write in with grammar questions (a UW NetID is required). Those will be answered by staff in the English Department’s Writing Center. It also includes links to other grammar resources, both on campus and off.
Griesbach and Chaemsaithong hope Ask Betty will be used by instructors all over campus, not just in the English Department, and that the site will continue growing and developing long after they’ve finished their degrees and departed.
“We were only supposed to get it started this summer,” Chaemsaithong said. “We hope others will improve on our efforts.”
Ask Betty, which recently went live, can be found at http://depts.washington.edu/engl/askbetty/
