A student turns in this paper:

many people think that we should not have ginetticly modifyed foods we could be having health problems in the future if we eat them, Some studys say that they cause cancer we should pass laws to stop this.

What do you do?

1. Nothing. That’s just how kids write.
2. Nothing. I want authentic writing, and I don’t want to devalue student voice.
3. I teach some lessons to help improve the writing.

Most of us will choose option C. We might teach a lesson about capitalization and give practice with capitalizing the first word of a sentence. We might then teach a lesson about “changing the y to i” before adding an ending and give some practice activities. We might reteach sentence structure with lessons about run-ons and then give some practice activities to help students identify run-ons.