The lingering difficulty of Errors and Expectations

         Nearly 40 years after its release, Errors and Expectations still rings true today.  Instructors like myself struggle addressing, recognizing, and categorizing student errors.  It's quite tempting to simply mark up a student's essay in red ink, circling all the errors; however, this exercise it rather useless to both student and teacher.  For the teacher, it is a lot of work; for the student, it is overwhelming and discouraging.  In the writing center, when working on a student one on one, we typically locate two common errors in their writing, as per Mina's suggestion, and focus on those.  This makes for a much more successful session as the student can absorb the limited information and the teacher can focus closely on only two concepts.  This is, as Mina notes, diving in.