Develop a system for responding to students’ work.

The paper itself:

• Read the whole paper quickly and check or underline parts that catch your attention.
• Go through the draft again.  If the essay lacks focus or a thesis statement and a plan for supporting its development, address that issue first, and don’t overcomment on paragraphs or sentence structure.
• Whenever possible, identify strong points & praise them.
• Praise good titles, subheadings, thesis statements, transitions, and so forth.
• Use marginal comments to indicate where organization becomes confusing.
• Note sentence-level problems that cause genuine lack of clarity with marginal comments, e.g., “What do you mean to say in this sentence?” or “This passage seems unrelated to the preceding ones.”
• Identify inappropriate or inaccurate use of key words, and compliment where the writer shows good command of terms or concepts.
• Resist the urge to circle every stylistic problem, misspelling or punctuation error.
• Provide the class with an example of a successful draft, and explain--or ask them to explain-- why it's successful.
• Use a rubric to rank the strengths and weaknesses of the draft

Provide a comment at the end of the paper that follows this formula: strengths—major problems—recommendations.

Example:

Fine draft, Sandy.  You understand what a paper in art history is supposed to look like. The problem your thesis addresses is not clear yet, but I indicated where you present some interesting ideas. I especially liked the section on Maplethorpe's photography.  I marked other places where you lost me.  For the next draft:
—Rewrite the introduction so you more clearly identify the problem you’re discussing.
—Work on organization.  I eventually found your thesis, but many of your paragraphs aren’t clearly linked to it.  As I noted in margins, you need to develop some of your ideas.
—Rethink what you said about Sontag.  I think you misread her argument, especially in paragraph 2, p. 3.