The instructor can make it clear that the grade is for the whole presentation -- clarity, organization, relevance -- and then routinely make the same correction marks made by a copy editor, without tying the grade to number or severity of those errors, e.g., no-errors gets an A, 1 to 5 gets a B, etc.
I once wrote ten words on the board and asked students to decide which of them they could reasonably define or explain. Raise your hand if you know one of the words. All hands came up. Two? Three? etc. They quickly dwindled until four admitted to knowing six, two knew 7 and no one knew 8 of the ten. The class was 32 college students.
I then revealed that the ten words were taken from the first two pages of the current TIME magazine, a "general circulation" publication. The result was a very interesting discussion of the relationship between vocabulary and understanding and how one might enhance one's vocabulary and hence one's ability to understand.
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