Correct punctuation is doable
The trick is to write objectives narrowly

Teachers shouldn't correct punctuation, grammar, or spelling errors in students' writing. Students should make their own corrections.

The trick to getting students to correct their own errors is having writing objectives that incorporate a carefully chosen list of specific punctuation errors and teaching students to meet those objectives.

Unhelpful writing mechanics standards

What usually happens is that teachers phrase writing objectives too broadly. For example, they will use phrasing such as

Students will observe the standards of good English.

That would be fine as a goal statement, but it is not an objective. Some other statements that look more specific are not measurable either. For example,

Students will use correct punctuation in their writing.

or even a narrower statement such as

Students will use commas correctly.

is too broad to be useful to either the teacher or the students.

If you ask, "Did the student use commas correctly?" the answer might be, "Some rules were used correctly some times."

Unless you specify which comma rules you want students to use correctly, you can't count the number of times the student applied the rule correctly and the number of times the student didn't.

What's worse is that you can't tell Joshua to correct his work to make sure he uses commas correctly because he won't know which of the 187 million comma rules (Josh's estimate) to apply.

Helpful punctuation standards

On the other hand, if your goal is that

Students will put a comma between the clauses of a compound sentence.

you make it possible for Josh to determine whether he did or did not correctly place a comma within a compound sentence.

Define your standard of correctness

Define correct punctuation and each of your other standards of writing mechanics in terms of

• Items you can count

• Sentence-specific questions that can be answered yes or no.

Let me give you an example of how the trick works.

Let's one of your annual goals is:

Students capitalize the first word of each sentence.

When you see a word group between periods or other ending punctuation in a student paper, you ask, "Did the student capitalize the first word of this sentence?"

The answer is either yes or no.

You can count the number of times the student did capitalize the first word of the sentence and the number of times the student did not.

You don't have to do all this from scratch. Check out my shortcut to writing objectives for writing mechanics in measurable ways.

Benefits of narrow objectives

Phrasing your writing mechanics issues narrowly has several benefits.

• Students can be taught to review and edit their drafts to correct punctuation and grammar mistakes.

• Students can track how often they make a particular error in each writing assignment.

• Students see how mastering even a single rule produces better grades.

If you define correctness on any writing mechanics issue using this simple trick, you'll make grading papers easier for yourself.