QUESTION: I’m trying to grade a set of student papers, and the careless grammar and punctuation errors are driving me crazy. A friend told me you had a way to deal with these that was a lot less work and a lot less time-consuming.
ANSWER:
This is probably the most common complaint I hear about student writing: students make careless grammatical/mechanical errors on their papers, and we spend hours of our time correcting them. My advice? Don’t do that! There is, in fact, a better way. It’s called minimal marking, and while it may not actually save our lives, it can definitely save our sanity.
The first thing we need to do is re-adjust our thinking. It’s not our job to correct our students’ grammatical/mechanical errors for them. In fact, doing that may be antithetical to the very thing that is our job: encouraging students to produce written work that will not by its very nature undermine their credibility as well-educated citizens.
The next thing we need to do is re-adjust our beliefs about what students can and can’t do. While it’s possible that we have some students on our campus who actually don’t know the difference between there, their, and they’re even when they stop to think about it or are asked to explain it, we can be almost 100% sure that those students are in the minority. In fact, research suggests that students are capable of correcting more than 60% of their own grammatical/mechanical errors once they put their minds to it (Haswell 601).
So how do we get them to put their minds to it? After all, they’ve gotten pretty used to letting us put OUR minds to it! (That’s what we’re doing when we correct their papers, right?) This is where minimal marking‖ (Haswell 600) comes in to play.
The next time you have a set of student papers, try this:
This may sound time consuming, but it’s actually much less time consuming than painstakingly correcting or even circling every grammatical/mechanical problem you see in a student text. Another advantage is that, if you routinely adapt this approach, there’s a good chance you’ll see a reduction in the number of checks you have to make over time. Students are likely to spend more time self-correcting BEFORE they submit their papers once they know they’re going to have to do it eventually anyway.
If you don’t think this system will work for you, there are other approaches you can try. You can, for example, mark or correct the problems you see only on the first page of the paper, adding a note that the same kinds of issues no doubt appear throughout. You can also deal with them in advance by requiring students to edit each other’s work and holding both the authors AND the editors accountable for the problems that remain. In the end, though, minimal marking is both expedient and instructive, and I think that’s a real plus.
