I’m a great believer in extra help. Pity so few kids take advantage of it by coming during office hours.
BUT!
There’s help. Thanks to Jing, and the class wiki, I can “push” extra help at individual students. Here’s three videos I made this morning, all for the same student. They’re not only here; they’re also on the student’s user page on the wiki. So if they’re checking their own user page regularly, they’ll see the extra help they need to get.
And getting the extra help to the student, in a timely fashion and in a form that they can remember, is probably half the battle.
This kind of editing could be immensely helpful for students, and you did it effectively. Your tone projected interest and respect, and you kept the focus on what the student could do to improve his or her writing. One additional tactic occurred to me while I was watching. Perhaps you could copy and paste the original sentence so as to have two copies of it visible. Do the revising on the second copy so that during and at the end of the process, both you and the student could compare the revised sentence with the original. Thank you very much for sharing this technique. I also very much appreciate your heads-up on the Preceden.com app, which my history students and I will find most useful.
Thanks for the kind words. I appreciate the feedback.