Blog #3 response and importance of commas

In the article Sudden Possibilities the author introduces her idea of mistakes having a deeper meaning than a simple grammatical error, she does this by writing "My Purpoise" As if she were to begin writing about a marine mammal. She continues on this idea of the reader drawing conclusion on the text based on the title. She states that although it is misleading for her she found it served a different purpose. That purpose was that it can engage students into reading further into the text by tricking them with a clever use of words. She also underlines the reasons that students might make common mistakes such as: spelling viola as walla. She describes that even though these are simple grammatical errors the reason behind them isn't simply a learning deficiency but is normal to the learning process. The author talks about error analysis and how teachers often approach correcting errors. She dives into DOL or Daily Oral Language, and at first gives reason why it might be beneficial she notes that it doesn't incite interest in the learning or understanding of the actual language. One of the problems she recognized with DOL is that the sentences or text their working with isn't usually student work, but "prepackaged classroom guides"( Crovitz, Darren p.33). Crovitz Argues that because the statements are detached, and random sentences that they exist in a vacuum. Crovitz then says that they are "contextually generic as opposed to an individual's actual language"(Crovitz, Darren p.33). Crovitz even brings in Weavers summary of research which states that students writing might actually suffer due to these random isolated activities. The author then points out that these DOL exercises assume "that repetition is key to better grammar"(Crovitz, Darren p.33). she concludes her ideas on DOL exercies elegantly by saying the writer rarely has a chance to look back at their own writing and why they make errors instead the attention is focused on the fact that the errors should just be fixed.
    When creating a DOL exercise I really wanted to highlight the importance of punctuation. Although the DOL exercises constantly use random generic sentences I tried to take a different approach and make the importance of punctuation stick. I do this by bringing in examples of wrong punctuation in everyday life; from signs to letters. One of the examples I found that deals with the importance of commas goes like this

"lets eat Grandma!"
or
"lets eat, Grandma!"    

Naturally the pattern of the week I chose to deal with was compound sentences. After doing some work looking up the importance of commas I noticed in some of the letters and larger pieces of text I found that compound sentences were more common. It is important to correctly use conjunctions and commas properly in compound sentences in order to avoid run on sentences.