I wonder if I’m the only one with that problem, but I’ve not come across a thread for it yet. When I’m correcting someone’s submitted writing I mark e.g. the beginning of a sentence that contains a mistake:
“In viele Fällen…”
But the system wouldn’t take “In viele Fällen” as the sentence but rather “In viele Fälle” (the last letter is missing).
I have not experienced that problem. Do you mean that there is a limit to the number of letters you can highlight?
No, the limit to the number of letters is another thing I experienced. But I didn’t mean that. It’s not that easy for me to explain.
Let’s say I want to correct the sentence
“I did not went home yesterday.”
So I mark “I did not went home” and click on “New Correction”. There are now two text boxes under the texts (Original Text Box, Corrected Text Box). The Original Text Box contains “I did not went hom” and the Corrected Text Box contains “I did not went home” (I did not yet change anything in these boxes!!!). And indeed, “I did not went hom” is now highlighted in the Original Text.
There are 3 possibilities of what can happen
a) The two text boxes contain the same sentence and it’s the sentence I highlighted. Everything’s fine. 
b) The two boxes contain the same sentence, but the last letter of the last word is missing in both.
c) The first box misses the last letter, the second box doesn’t. That’s the worst case.
That happens all the time and I thought the mistake is caused by my computer. But today I used another computer and it still occurs.
Is anyone else experiencing this?
We had problems like this in the past due to a bug in Firefox. Are you using Firefox and, if so, which version?
It happens me a lot, too. I thought it was because of Japanese being Beta.
Other than Bjoern mentioned, here is another problem I have in the Japanese area:
My example sentence would be “私がお弁とを食べた。” I want to correct it to “私はお弁当を食べた。” First, I highlight “が” and click the “New Correction” button, but the original box contain “私” instead of “は” and the second box shows “は.” So I delete it, then start over again until I get the right response.
Then I select “お弁と.” But now system might say “you cannot correct overlapped letters” or something although there is no overlapping. I don’t remember what it exactly said. So when it happens, I delete my previous correction, and select “私がお弁と”, then correct it to “私はお弁当.”
This problem might be just because of Asian letters as I first thought. I am using Firefox 3.0.1 on Windows Vista.
Emma,
Can you try it on IE and see if you still have those problems.
OK! I will try correcting on IE next time
I use IE, not Firefox.
Ok. Back to the drawing board…
I use IE, and have this problem sometimes.
I corrected a writing on IE today, and I had the same problem. Both Bejoem’s and my problem happened at the same sentence.
I must say it’s quite hard to replicate this problem. I can make it happen but very rarely. At any rate, when it does you can just add another word to your selected text and the problem doesn’t happen anymore.
Emma, it may happen a little more when selecting individual characters but I would recommend you try not to select individual characters. In fact, most of the time selecting a phrase and not a word or character gives more meaning to the mistake as it gives the learner more context when they are reviewing.
In my case it happens very often, I would say the chance is about 50 %. And I can’t undo this just by adding the missing characters. If I add the missing characters, the whole text (the corrected text as a whole) will be correct, but: The student also gets a list of the particular mistakes and those will still be wrong. So the student has to look at the particular corrections in relation to the whole text to avoid confusion. Especially in german, where the words can have many different endings, it is very confusing.
Hi Bjorn,
It’s just not something we can fix right now. All I can suggest is that you add a word to your selection either before or after the phrase you are trying to grab and the problem should disappear.
What about others? Annett, you are correcting German. Are you experiencing these difficulties?
I would recommend that all correctors only highlight the shortest possible phrase that corrects any language problems. When I do corrections I try to limit any highlighted mistake to 3 or 4 words maximum.
I use Firefox and I had no problems with corrections. As Steve mentioned, I try to correct only short phrases. I know from my student, that is very confusing, if the teacher change the whole sentence.
Discussing about writing submissions, I have a suggestion. It would be very helpful to have a automatic print with the original writing and the correct writing with the markers and the table of explanations. Sometimes I prefer the old printed version and I am sure other too
Today when I did a correction of a writing submission I’ve had a lot of trouble. When I choose a word for example “Kommunikationen” only “Kommunikatione” is marked up as wrong word. This phenomenon appears 8 or 9 times in the text.
It appears also with very short words for example “werde” → “werd”.
I use Internet Explorer 7.
Today I had this problem too, I had a very long text. Maybe there is sometimes an overflow. I had no chance to correct this. I have deleted the last letter, but this increased the corrections. I use the IE. What should we do in the future?
Did you try deleting a correction you were having a problem with, selecting one extra word in the correction and trying again? This should solve the problem, I think.