Grading Writing

Note: This post will only be of interest to people in academia and will probably bore my normal readers. So if you are normal, don't read this. Really. Go and follow me on Twitter or something.

Ever since I started grading essays (and that was a looong time ago, boys and girls), I had assumed, along with most of my colleagues, that if you were going to break down the way you gave grades, rather than just holding the paper up to the light and saying "Hmmm, looks like a B+," it would be along the following lines:

1. Argument;
2. Organisation;
3. Language;
4. Other stuff.

"Argument" (or "Content" if you want to be more vague) is what you are left with if you remove all the citations, jumble up the sentences and translate the result into Chinese. Or at least it's what you'd get if you were very patient and good at reading Chinese. "Organisation" is presumably what you'd get if you were to replace all the words with abstract symbols. "Language" is mercifully straightforward: academics can argue for hours about what constitutes good grammar or style, but at least there is no doubt that grammar and style are what we are grading here. "Other stuff" could be quotation, citation, punctuation (which some people think isn't part of language), fonts or whatever you want, and it often gets tagged awkwardly onto one of the other three to give us hybrid criteria like "Argument and Use of Sources" or "Language and Citation". In fact, until today, I'd thought the main problem was just where to stick the "other stuff".

What I was ignoring was that argument and organisation are pretty much inseparable. You can separate them in theory, as I demonstrated above, but in practice they usually go together, or at least they do in ENG 101. I occasionally give a paper "D" for argument and "A" for organisation, but that's nearly always because the paper is off-topic or factually inaccurate; I hardly ever do the reverse, because a paper which is disorganised is not well-argued. Another problem with dealing with organisation on its own is that you end up doling out a lot of average-to-high grades because it is easy for students, once they've learnt the basics, to do cookie-cutter organisation. They know what teachers want, and it's easy to provide it. Thesis statement? Check. Some crap to lead into the thesis statement? Check. Paragraphs with one main idea? Check. Topic sentences? Check. This method might not get you an "A" for organisation, but it will guarantee you a "B". So when there is a discrepancy between the grades for argument and organisation, it is often because the student is simply writing to a formula.

It seems, then, that it is best to treat argument and organisation as one entity for the purposes of grading. This leaves us with language, which is worth a band to itself, and "other stuff", some of which could go in with language (e.g. punctuation) and most of which is to do with using sources, so we could have the following:

1. Argument / Organisation;
2. Use of Sources / Citation;
3. Language.

Looks simple enough to me.