That’s what most of us feel when we get a stack of student papers full of grammatical errors, flawed arguments, and awkward diction. You can put red circles around the mistakes. Or you can jot cryptic comments in the margins. Either way, you suspect you’re not reaching students. Isn’t it time for a change?

Back in the early 1960’s, the National Council of Teachers of English came out with guidelines on responding to student papers. The verdict? Correct every single error and write a lengthy note at the end to justify the grade.

It’s what some faculty call the ‘search-and-destroy’ method, but it’s based on the industrial model of mass production. Teachers were supposed to turn student papers into standardized products.

Forty years later, we know correcting every mistake takes forever. We suspect students ignore our comments. And even students glib enough to turn out a standardized product rarely think of their writing as conveying thoughts to another person.

For many students, writing a paper means little more than fulfilling a set of arcane requirements. Too often, students don’t perceive papers as an opportunity to communicate; rather, a paper is just something they have to crank out.

We’re now trying to give students a sense of what it feels like to have their work read by another human being. Encouraging student writers to be aware of the reader is critical. This awareness touches everything – spelling and grammar, logic and coherence. Ideally, teachers should help students think of themselves as both writers and readers. That takes the emphasis away from the product as something to be ‘shaped-up.’ It puts the emphasis back on the writer working in the world.

Forget formulas. Emphasize the flexible, human component of writing if you want better papers from students. Show your class the most compelling essays you’ve received in the past. Talk about why each one is wonderful. Point out that the papers don’t follow rigid formulas—or express the party line. Students will see that there is a range of possibilities, a range of ‘correctness.’ They should also see how the best essays from students include frequent applications and transitions, not just the words, thoughts and ideas of often paraphrased quotes in the text.

Many faculty credit Peter Elbow’s 1981 book, ‘Writing With Power,’ with introducing "reader-based feedback" that emphasizes writing as communication.

The instructor responds as a reader, not as someone who is there to correct everything. You make your marginal comments part of a dialogue, a conversation with the writer. You could write, ‘I got lost here,’ or ‘You stated a point but did not back it up; now I’m confused.’ Reader-based comments are not highly ‘directive.’ They’re not based on rigid criteria. They simply give the writer an interested reader’s spontaneous reaction.

Start with a quick read. On your first quick reading, treat the student’s writing as a real voice that you listen to with respect, but that you question. Don’t worry about grading, just respond.

Then play smart reader. Read through a second time and analyze your reader-based comments. Ask yourself, ‘Why did I get lost here?’ You may notice a bunch of run-on sentences. If that’s what threw you off, leave a note to the student: ‘These run-on sentences threw me off track.’ If you want to move on to another level of feedback, you can offer suggestions. You can tell the student to hook up two sentences and subordinate one of the points so that it will be easier to follow the argument.

Don’t edit for students. If you just put in a comma somewhere, it’s not a learning experience for the student. Point out the problem and give the student a chance to work on it. While we encourage faculty to proofread student papers, it is still our aim to help the student learn from the experience. If you’re confused because the student’s grammar is off, you still react as a reader. In any discipline, you can respond to matters of style—grammar, syntax, punctuation, and jargon—by pointing out that the problem threw you off as a reader. You can note: ‘I can’t follow this; you need to rephrase it,’ or ‘Is your point this or that? I can’t tell because your language isn’t clear.’ Anything that interferes with meaning can be dealt with in a reader-based response. If the reader is going to miss the point because of bad grammar and spelling, or if the reader is simply insulted, then the writer needs to know those things are a problem.

Treat their writing seriously. The more seriously you treat the paper, as an act of communication, the more likely the students will attend to your comments. Let them know you’re the sort of reader who is willing to listen, but you aren’t willing to accept everything they say just because they say it. There are some real shortcuts in this trade, and there are a lot of illusory ones. When you’re dealing with large classes, it’s easy to short-change students if you aren’t systematic.

Start when you’re fresh. It takes a tremendous amount of stamina and clear-sightedness to disentangle student writing. If you start at your peak performance time, you’ll go faster. I can try to do student papers at night, but I’m much more efficient in the morning. I’ll do a paper in a quarter of the time that it would take me if I weren’t fresh.

Don’t jump right in. When you have a lot of papers, it’s a mistake just to start reading. When you’ve given a new assignment, you don’t know exactly what you’re looking for. If you try to read one paper, assign the grade, and go on to the next paper, you’ll be inconsistent. You’ll generally miss the student’s key problem.

Calculate your time. Figure out how much time you’ve got to spend and how much you can allocate to each paper. If you plough through the stack, there’s a tendency to be more thorough with the first ones and then less thorough as you run out of time and energy.

Don’t try to catch everything. There’s a limit to what students can absorb. You can paralyze them and waste your time by commenting too much.

Why multiple readings? You need to skim through all the papers once to get a rough idea of what the range is. On the second reading, you comment on obvious problems of argumentation. Ask yourself if the paper has a clear point. Does the paper stay focused on its stated point? Does the argument develop? Once you’ve commented on the obvious problems, pencil in a grade. But don’t let your role as judge get in the way of your teaching. As much as possible, try to come across as a coach, even a collaborator in your comments.

Checking consistency. After the second reading, stack the papers according to their tentative grade. Then read the papers in each stack against one another. You’ll see whether you’ve been consistent or not. This is particularly important in large classes—anything over 15 people. We all have a tendency to be harder on the first papers we grade. As we go along, we generally become more forgiving.

Detecting subtle problems. In the third reading, you have an opportunity to teach even the writers of ‘A’ papers. Most of us have a tendency to triage. We spend the most time on the worst papers and let the ‘A’ papers go without comment. But that cheats the very students who have the motivation and the intellectual curiosity to profit from any critique you might give them. Many UOP students have a very superficial, polished style. They have a great facility for cranking out sentences. When you’re reading quickly, their papers seem fine. But if you probe beneath the surface, you realize the paper is shallow, or the argument just doesn’t hang together. If you let these students breeze by, you’re denying them the education they came to the Nevada Campus to achieve. Only multiple readings catch these glib stylists and their shallow arguments. If you try to do it all in one reading, you become suspended on the obvious details—the easiest things to respond to. The best comments encourage students to be clearer and to argue their points more effectively. Try to encourage students to improve their current paper, or to do better on the next assignment—whether it’s in your class or someone else’s.