Here are three things that can help to save time when commenting, to have a bit more work/life balance:
- Reading with Purpose: having one or two things on your mind as you read that relate to what your goals are for the unit you are currently teaching as well as course goals for the course.
- Limiting Comments: only commenting once or twice per page (e.g., about 4-6 comments on a 4 page double-spaced paper).
- Using the Clock: setting a timer as you read.
Reading with Purpose. You’ll always be reading student work in the context of what you have been teaching that week and in that unit. What have been the driving questions? Are you focused on working with sources? On voice? On sentence level work? On argument? On writing as inquiry? On visual rhetoric? On writing for an imagined audience? Use what you have already done in class to look at how students are practicing writing with those lessons in the background. This does not mean you shouldn’t address items other than what your focus is, only that a restricted focus can help you find some things that would be currently relevant at the moment (doing the double work of making you more efficient and relevant to current lessons), and help prevent you from going off on too many tangents. Rubrics can be helpful here, but you do not need a rubric to read with a purpose in the context of a specific unit or lesson.
Limiting Comments. You don’t have to mark everything. It is bad for the student (who gets overwhelmed) and it is bad for you (because it is more work). Students can only absorb so much, so you don’t want to have too many comments on a student’s writing anyway. There are, of course, exceptions. Some students will happily ingest every bit of feedback you have. But, remember, these are exceptions. Therefore, pedagogically, it is good for students to do less, not more. Many of us simply cannot process that much feedback at once, within the rhythm of a semester long course which will have more work each week. One possible number to try to do is no more than 2 comments per page, with the goal of some pages having no comments and, if necessary, having a page with more than 2 comments—so, a 5 page paper might have 4 comments and an endnote. Sometimes, it is good to go back through and delete comments, if necessary. Sometimes people just do endnotes, where they refer back to moments that illustrate what they are talking about within the endnote (e.g., in paragraph 2 on page 4, what about…).
Using the Clock. Using a timer can be helpful. If you are a new teacher, you need to take the time to figure out the rhythms of reading through a paper, making a comment, and (if necessary) revising your comment to make sure it fits the situation and student. It might be best not to use a timer in the early going if you are a new teacher, as you need to figure out what your methods are for commenting. What you might do, instead, is run a stopwatch to pick up how long you are taking on each student. Once you find yourself in a groove, using a timer can help. The threat of the clock can help you stay on task. For instance, setting a timer of 12 minutes for each paper. That does not mean each paper takes 12 minutes. Some need more time, and that is ok (fewer need less time, but that does happen, too). However, the ticking clock can help stay on task and can help finish sooner than you might otherwise.
As an example: A 12 minute clock for, say, 19 students in one class works out to about 4 hours in one week, assuming some papers don’t exceed 12 minutes and that you don’t take breaks, respond to a quick email, etc.—so let’s call it 5 hours, instead. Another 3ish hours is in-class time, teaching. Another 2-3 hours can be committed to lesson planning. Another hour or two for meeting with students, emailing with students, keeping up with readings for the class, etc. That works out to roughly 10-12 hours of teaching-related activities for one class in one week.
Three more things that might also help, but maybe less important than above:
One, make sure you are putting it on the student to let the comment be a starting point for their revision, not an editing note that fixes something specifically for them to do. Use questions in your comment (e.g., What do you mean by…? How so? What if…?) or follow up comments with questions that make certain they are part of the process (e.g., What do you think?). Not having the answers is both more intellectually honest and it saves labor because you aren’t doing the work for the student.
Two, make sure you look for positive things to say up front. It can become easy to fall in the critic’s trap of only looking at things to fix, but if you are committed to building up your students’ confidence, try to get ahead of that by looking for positive elements first rather than trying to retrofit it in there later. Sometimes forgetting to do that can make you spend more time with a paper because you had to go back through it one more time.
Three (from Janet Zellman, a lecturer at the University of Pittsburgh): Schedule your commenting time. For instance, if you teach MWF, then make sure every Tuesday and Thursday from 10am-11am and 3pm-4pm that you comment on papers. Having four hours scheduled for this work makes it much more likely that it gets done. Makes it a bit harder to procrastinate or linger too long on any one paper.
Dr. Daniel Libertz joined the faculty at Baruch College this fall, where he is also Associate Director of First-Year Writing. He earned his PhD at the University of Pittsburgh in 2020 and has been teaching and tutoring writing for over ten years at a variety of institutions (e.g., small liberal arts college, high school, military college, community college). Believing writing is meant to be read, he privileges the dialogic nature of writing in his classes.