Giving feedback on "grammar"
Grading tips for better writing outcomes

Most teachers believe in giving feedback the same way their high school English teacher did. Miss Mildred Martyr slaved over papers, correcting every grammar error, writing Awk and ||ism in the margins, single-handedly using up three-quarters of the school district's annual allotment of red pens.

If you do what Miss Martyr did you'll get what Miss Martyr got: hundreds of students who dread writing because they are sure they cannot possibly do it well enough.

You can choose alternative ways of giving feedback on students' writing mechanics to promote student learning while reducing the amount of time you spend grading papers.

Make students correct their work

In a writing class, the writing assignments are tests of the students' mastery of the writing process. Editing is part of that writing process.

Josh and Caitlin have to correct their own errors and edit their own papers to demonstrate that they understand the writing process.

If you correct students' errors or edit their papers, you are cheating as surely as if you took your students' SATs for them.

Make a master list of errors

For use in all your classes, make a master list of specific errors in grammar and punctuation that you actually see in students' written work. Keep the list to 40 items maximum; 20 items is even better.

Number each item. As you grade papers, highlight an error and insert the error number in brackets in the text if you are grading on a computer or circled in the margin if you are working by hand. Ignore any writing mechanics errors not on your list.

This procedure makes giving feedback on specific errors easy for you without shifting responsibility for correcting errors away from students.

Tips for list creation:

1. Make your master list appropriate to your students. I use Connors and Lunsford's list of 20 grammar and mechanics errors for my base. Errors on the list are made by writers of all ages, both native English speakers and English language learners.

2. If you have younger students or a group addicted to text messaging, you could include items like "sentence starts with capital letter."

3. If you have a large number of students for whom English is a second language, you may want to add errors that are common among ESL students.

Establish individual error baselines

Another trick for giving feedback that works well is having students track their own writing mechanics errors to enable you to individualize instruction.

Here's how I do it.

I set a diagnostic period at the beginning of a course. During that time, when I find any one of the errors from my master list in student writing, I highlight the error in the paper and insert in the text in square brackets that item's error number.

I have students chart their errors to find the ones they make most frequently. During the diagnostic period, I flag errors but do not count off for them.

Make students design IEPs

At the end of the diagnostic period, I have each student identify a stated number of those errors (between 2 and 6) the student will attempt to eliminate from his/her writing by the end of the course. I think of it as a kind of individual educational plan.

I have each student prepare his/her personal grading rubric incorporating the specific errors on their IEP into my writing assessment rubric. Then I limit myself to giving feedback and grading to only the specific writing mechanics items on the rubric. The only errors a student has to master in the course are those on the student's own IEP.

The teaching I have to do isn't lessened, but the time I have to spend grading is vastly reduced.

Have errors trigger a grade cap

Allowing students to get failing grades in writing because of errors in mechanics is a sure way to turn them off writing.

My alternative is to put a cap on the highest grade a student can get if he/she has more than X number of errors from his/her count's off list.

The grade cap seems to me to be a reasonable compromise between letting your grading be dominated by mechanics issues and making mechanics appear trivial to students.

My practice is the set my grade cap equal to a grade of C. The only students affected by the cap are competent writers who have poor writing mechanics. Examine one of the grading rubrics I use when teaching writing. You will see that until students achieve writing competence, the grade cap is irrelevant.

Restrict flagging to protect egos

Do you have some students whose writing mechanics are so bad there would be more flags than paper?

Nothing discourages students so quickly as a paper covered with notes about their mistakes. When you are giving feedback also give students a glimmer of hope that they can clean up their writing.

You can limit your flags to one or two paragraphs, with a note saying that's what you did. Josh still learns he needs to eliminate sentence fragments, but he doesn't feel as overwhelmed, and neither do you.

The trick is purely psychological, but a great deal of what you have to do in teaching writing is to shape attitudes, isn't it?

See suggested grading practices for giving feedback on the "writing" aspects of student papers.