Prioritize

Most students will spend only a few minutes reading your comments. So prioritize. What are a couple of things they should work on for the next draft or the next assignment? What are you responding to? Early draft? Mid-stage draft? Finished project that you’re grading? The context should drive your responding decisions.

Distinguish between “responding” and “editing”

Early drafts usually need comments on global issues like development, organization, and structure. Later drafts can get into style or editing issues. Most busy people won’t add, delete, or move big chunks of text once they’ve invested time doing meticulous editing.(And if you edit students’ papers for them, they don’t need to and won’t learn how to do it for themselves.) So comment on first things first, and don’t try to do everything at once.

Take it easy

Stop yourself from commenting on every little thing. Instead of circling all problems you see, do an error analysis to recognize patterns of error. If a paper has fifty errors in it, the writer might have made five errors ten times, or ten errors five times. Work on a couple of those patterns. Make sure writers understand any applicable rules, and hold them accountable for avoiding those errors in the future. Then move on to other patterns. If it makes you feel better, tell them you’ve commented on only a few issues.

Balance your comments

Whether you’re commenting on ideas or sentence structure, be sure to provide a balance of specific praise and constructive, tactful suggestions or observations. No one wants a litany of what they did wrong. No one wants patronizing pats on the head. Point to and name some specific things that are working well. Identify some things they should work on in the future. But there’s no exact formula. Some writers need, and can handle, more critique; some writers need more support just to get them back at the computer.

Try different commenting tools

Experiment with different ways of responding to see what works best for you and your students. Different students may prefer different approaches.

• We’ve all scrawled handwritten comments in the margins, but students sometimes cannot read our writing, and if we want to keep a copy of our sage comments, we need to run to the photocopier or scanner.
  

  Try to avoid angry-looking or mysterious scrawls.

• The Comment feature in Word allows you to type comments near the spot you want to comment on. Students won’t need to read your handwriting, and you can easily save a copy of what you wrote to them. Just be sure to tell students to download the file in Word. The comments won’t show up if the file is downloaded as a Google doc.
• Google doc does allow comments in the right margin. Unlike the main part of the Google doc, though, the comment must be saved or it won’t be. Be sure to click on “Comment.” Also, comments are not visible in “view” mode; they must be downloaded.
• End comments, as long as they are balanced and specific, are also a good choice, with or without accompanying marginal comments.
• You could try audio comments, with a voice memo accompanying a marked up document.
• I sometimes use the screencasting tool Jing for commenting on short papers. Jing creates a five-minute video, which allows me to scroll around the document as I comment on it.
• Try Skype or Google Hangout if you’re mostly going to discuss ideas for an early draft.
• One-on-one conferencing, especially for drafts still in progress, is probably the best way to respond, if you can schedule the time.

There are other good ideas out there. Experiment.

Whatever tools you use in responding to students’ papers, do try to avoid mysterious checks on students’ papers, unexplained question marks, angry-looking punctuation, or abbreviations students might not understand.

When responding to students’ papers, it’s good to keep in mind the Hippocratic Oath: “Above all, do no harm.”