It's Past My Bedtime and I Still have to Read Two More Essays after this Response

The question I often find myself facing when grading papers is how much to say. in "Teachers' Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers," one of the things Robert Connors and Andrea Lunsford discuss is the amount of margin notes and end comments that teachers' make on their students' papers. In general, it seems they found that most margin notes are just one or a couple of words. And short comments of 10 words or less are far more prevalent than lengthy comments of 100 words or more. I've never actually gone through the trouble of counting the number of words in my comments, but I'm certain they consist of considerably more than 10 words. In fact, I think Connors and Lunsford would probably be impressed by the amount of (hopefully useful) commentary that I give students. But I've found that this sort of heightened scrutiny can be time consuming for the teacher and overwhelming for the student, and I wonder if I might be better served by limiting the amount of commentary I make.

Often I wonder if I'm doing my students a disservice by spending too much time analyzing every rhetorical (and often mechanical) aspect of their papers. First, from a practical standpoint I find myself spending far too long on each individual paper, to the point that it always takes me no less than ten days to grade the entire stack of my student papers, and that's devoting at least two or three hours a day to grading. I wonder if my end notes are too long. Last semester we were advised to limit the amount of writing we did at the end of the paper, but I always find that I want to address every aspect of the paper that I think students could focus on in their improvements. Partly this is a defense mechanism, what Connors and Lunsford would describe as justifying my grade, but also it's because I find it difficult to simply focus a student's attention on the one or two aspects of their paper that need the most work, which I think might be a more beneficial way of addressing what needs work in a paper.

In addition, I find myself concerned that in giving students the amount of feedback that I do I may be overwhelming them. Generally I address several recurring rhetorical issues in any given paper, sometimes as many as half a dozen, and I often wonder if it might be better to focus in on one or two aspects of the paper that could be improved. After all, a student can't be expected to reach perfection even necessarily over the course of one semester, and when presented with several issues all of which the student will feel compelled to focus on in the next paper, it may create a sense of paralysis, in which the student is focusing so hard on the issues I addressed in their previous paper that they can't even get any thoughts down on paper. This concern of mine does not arise arbitrarily; I mention it because it's a concern that I've experienced in my own academic courses.

So while Connors and Lunsford seem slightly complimentary of those teachers who make numerous lengthy margin notes and end comments, I wonder if we might be better served to err on the side of specificity when picking and choosing which aspects of any given paper are most problematic and should be focus on with greatest detail.