teacher comments for essays

Good teachers know that students need detailed, prescriptive, and personal comments on their essays throughout the writing process to make significant improvement. However, the process can be time-consuming and frustrating. It would not be unusual for a teacher to spend 15 minutes to red-mark and write comments on the rough draft of a five-paragraph essay, then repeat the process to evaluate the final draft. Even with that significant amount of time, comments would have to be concise and rely upon abbreviations and diacritical marks. The focus has to be limited to identifying what is wrong, not explaining why it is wrong. No time for examples or suggestions as to how to improve the writing. Maybe a quick positive comment. Exhausting! Additionally, frustration mounts as the teacher has to write the same comments over and over again throughout a stack of student papers. Only to be exacerbated when, after receiving their graded essays, students simply glance at their final grades before cramming the essay into the bottom of their backpacks. There has got to be a better way Why Using Essay e-Comments Makes Sense 1. Having students submit their essays on the computer enhances the interactive writing process and the social context of writing by facilitating reader response and writer revision. 2. Submitting essays electronically is environmentally responsible, saves money, and provides an automatic portfolio of student work. Submission options are numerous: Google Docs®, Turnitin®, Moodle Docs®, Viper®, Screencast®, a school network dropbox, or e-mail. 3. The essay e-comments provide a common language of writing instruction and discourse for teachers and students. 4. Teachers can respond to and/or evaluate essays in much less time than if graded manually. Using essay e-comments cuts grading time in half. If it takes 15 minutes to red-mark, write comments, and grade a.
.:VirtualSalt Robert Harris Version Date: April 29, 1997  Writing comments on student papers is something of an art: it requires a little thought and practice for the comments to be effective--that is, both read and attended to. The following recommendations about writing comments were developed for students in writing and literature classes; however, with a little adjustment, they can be applied to any writing assignment. 1. Remember that students' egos are very fragile. Be careful in your comments not to hurt the students unnecessarily. Tell the students in advance that the job they do on a paper is not a reflection of their worth as a human being. A D paper does not make them a D human being. Many students have gotten grades in high school based on how well the teacher liked them, so when you give them a C or D, they think you hate them. Explain that this is not so. It might be good to say, The more marks you find on your paper, the more it means I like you. If I didn't care about you, I wouldn't bother to put any marks on your paper. 2. Don't mark errors or make comments in red. Red ink looks like blood and screams at the student, How dare you make this mistake! Use pencil or neutral pen color like blue or green. (Pencil also allows for erasures, in case you change your mind about a grade, marking, comment, or suggestion.) 3. Don't use comments merely to justify the grade. That is, don't just summarize all the mistakes you've marked or point out all the deficiencies in the paper so that the student won't object to the grade you assign. If all the comments are negative, the students will either not read them or be depressed by them. Remember that you want to increase their motivation to do better on future papers. 4. Be sure to point out some positive things about the paper. Most papers have at least a few things that the student has done well. Good insights.
Introduction After marking essays for several years, I find that most of my comments are things that I repeat over and over again from one essay to the next (and all too often, from one essay to the next by the same student). To save myself time in marking, and to give myself more time to provide feedback on particular aspects of essays I am marking, I have compiled this list of frequently used comments. You could think of it as a greatest hits of essay writing errors. When you look at your essay, you will see a number of codes in circles featuring a letter and a number. The letter is the broad category and the number is the specific number of the comment within that letter. Please look to the list below to find the relevant comment. Grammar G1 -- Comma splice. G2 -- This word is not a coordinating conjunction, so this is a comma splice. G3 -- Vague antecedent. It is not clear to what this pronoun refers. G4 -- Sentence fragment. G5 -- Subject/verb agreement problem. G6 -- Wrong verb tense or a shift in verb tense. G7 -- Run-on sentence. G8 -- Although the next word is a coordinating conjunction, a comma is not needed here. Arguments and Evidence A1 -- Good point, but explain the argument in more detail. A2 -- Probably right, but you don't provide adequate evidence to prove your point. A3 -- Does not follow. There is no logical link between this statement and the one before it. Organisation O1 -- This paragraph needs a topic sentence. O2 -- This paragraph lacks unity. O3 -- You are talking about a new idea, so you should start a new paragraph. O4 -- This is too vague and/or equivocal to work as a thesis statement for the essay. O5 -- This is a good topic sentence because it is clear and focused. O6 -- There is no thesis statement for the essay. O7 -- This is too short to stand alone as a paragraph. Either develop the ideas further or incorporate them into one of the.
Here is the skeleton in every writing teacher’s closet: grading essays is soul sucking, mind-breaking work. After fifteen years of dedicating obscene chunks of personal time to the task, I wish I could reveal some cure-all that makes grading fast and euphoric. I can’t. Of course, I find many moments of joy, but the bone-weary reality of the life of an English teacher is that it takes considerable time and significant effort to create meaningful feedback. No matter how I try, I can’t seem to write comments on an essay in less than fifteen minutes. Realistically, it often takes more time. I have experimented with many methods of feedback, but when I need to leave a healthy dose of ink, I use a hybrid approach of handwritten feedback and computer editing tools known as macros. This method doesn’t help me grade more quickly, but it does ensure that I maximize my time. Here’s my basic structure for working through a stack of essays:  Students turn in two copies of an essay, one printed and one electronic copy via Google Docs. I write more quickly on a piece of paper than I can highlight on a computer screen (I have timed each activity), so I go “old school” and leave marks on the page. The two to five minutes I save on each essay quickly add up. I also use a set of symbols to speed this marking process along. I type longer comments that I later print and attach to the essay. I use macros (more on this step below) for common comments, but I also individualize feedback. I always limit myself to one page of typed comments per essay. When finished, I photocopy the completed scoring rubric (which I will use during the revision process), print the one page of typed comments, and then staple the typed comments, the marked essay, and the scoring guide into one packet. I give students at least one week to revise based on my feedback. I require a revision of every major essay, and.