These guidelines are designed to help you save time while maintaining fair, consistent grading combined with useful feedback for improving writing.

1. Use a rubric. It helps you provide quick feedback in many areas so that you can save your writing to respond to the student’s work. It also assures every student receives feedback about the same features of their writing.
2. Use a pencil. Especially if you’re tired. You can erase comments you think better of in the morning.
3. Don’t copy edit. Research shows that correcting students’ grammatical and correctness errors doesn’t improve their writing. Correcting error-riddled writing takes up your time, overwhelms (and discourages) students, and actually makes them read fewer of your comments. And it makes students lazy, because we can’t catch all of their (or our own) typos and errors–make them responsible for this. Try instead one of these strategies: a) give students 20 minutes in class to proof papers–with their handbooks, on the day the papers are due. Ask them to make any corrections neatly in pen and let them ask you and their peers questions during this time. Good discussions often ensue. b) Offer them the opportunity to side-shadow before they turn in a paper–that is, to ask you questions about their choices on the draft (or in the draft). c) When responding papers, concentrate on those errors that interfere with meaning–the ones that confuse you as a reader. d) If there are many errors, and they interfere with your ability to interact with the text, try editing a paragraph and then work with the student to edit the others. e) If you have to go to a handbook to see if it’s an error, you’re being nit-picky and not helpful.
4. Use marginal comments as dialogue. Feel free to ask legitimate questions. Praise items that are good or improved, even if not perfect. Comments such as, "This is a strong piece of evidence and a good place for it in your argument. You need to paraphrase more carefully though, or put quotes around phrases and ideas that are not yours. Let’s talk about how to do this more effectively" open a dialogue where an accusation of plagiarism closes down discussion. Most first year students have difficulty using sources–comment on it, help them with it.
5. Use a top-down response strategy: COEE–content, organization, expression, editing. Focus feedback on higher level issues. It is not useful to discuss editing problems with a student whose paper has no focus or relevant research. Comments on content and organization precede comments on expression and editing.
6. In end comments, begin with something you can honestly praise. Try to enjoy student writing–even if you can only praise a good idea gone very, very bad. Use a full sentence of praise–no buts, howevers, or althoughs.
7. Choose one or two issues to comment on. More than that is too much for you and your students. Try to follow up in the next paper or draft, noting improvement if it is there.
8. Close by offering a specific strategy for revision, a source to explore, or an idea to try in future projects. This strategy makes your response part of a process rather than a post-mortem.
9. Don’t spend time justifying a grade. Your rubric and evaluation criteria should help students see where their work falls and why. Encourage them to come to you with questions or concerns about grades–but justifying a grade is time-consuming for you and not helpful in improving student writing–focus instead on rhetorical issues–how the choices that inform the document meet the needs of its audience.
10. Try to offer all students the same level of response. It is easy to give struggling students more of your time than strong students. Try to challenge your strong students move to the next level, too. "Good job" doesn’t tell even talented novice writers what they’ve done well–and they often don’t know. (And long comments really overwhelm weak students.) Try 35-50 words per student and make yourself stop.