How Much Grading is Too Much Grading?

In "Students, Authorship, and the Work of Composition," Bruce Horner quotes David Bartholomae, who states, "the most precious thing I can do is provide spaces where I don't also [in addition to the culture] do [students'] thinking for them" (qtd. in Horner 512). Peter Elbow takes this philosophy a step further by removing the pressure of grades from his students' composition papers. In my own grading, I take a position that is the polar opposite from this, copiously grading students' papers and making as many notes as I can regarding how students can improve their papers. On the one hand, the risk is that I am stifling students' creativity by telling them exactly how to revise their papers. on the other, students will be expected in their other classes to meet certain mandated standards of appropriate writing. While proponents of the former philosophy might argue that these standards are set in a manner that promotes an imbalanced social contract, I feel that purposefully overlooking potential weaknesses in student papers for the sake of their autonomy as authors as a way of hopefully balancing the scales is ultimately doing them a disservice.

With that being said, I do often wonder if I'm a little too enthusiastic in my rooting out of potential weaknesses in student papers. I find myself spending sometimes as much as fifteen to twenty minutes (or more) per student paper, carefully cataloging every way that a student could improve their organization, clarify their thoughts, provide more evidence, or analyze more deeply. By the time that I'm done grading student papers, almost every page is covered with margin notes and line edits, and I often suspect that there comes a point when it's too much, when students shut down and become unwilling to read all my scribblings in the margins, or worse yet, when my notes only confuse or discourage them. Not to mention the fact that the amount of time I spend grading papers becomes impractical. I wonder if maybe I am doing what Bartholomae warns against, failing to prove a space where my students can do their own thinking in their writing rather than having me do all the thinking for them. I wonder if I wouldn't be doing my students (and myself) more of a service to prioritize and focus in on the one or two most serious problems in each student's paper.