Time Saving Strategies for Responding to
Student Writing

1. Front-load your investment in writing.
In other words, the more time you spend on assignment design and rubrics, the less time you will need to spend commenting on papers, listening to complaints, and teaching students what you want.

2. Begin with reasonable assumptions about student writing.
If you expect students to come to your class writing lucid, crisp, precise prose, you will be disappointed -- and you may spend extra time responding to student writing.

3. Determine your priorities in teaching writing.
Even in a writing-intensive course, you probably cannot teach students how to all of the following:
a. develop a sophisticated historical argument,
b. incorporate secondary sources into their histories,
c. develop good introductions to their essays, and
d. rid their prose of mechanical errors.

4. Decide what is most important to you and set a reasonable goal that students can accomplish . Ration your comments. Ideally, every piece of student writing should receive a clear and complex response. But we don't live in an ideal world, and many students benefit more from a brief, straightforward response. Consider pointing out one or two strengths and one or two areas for improvement.

5. Designate some writing assignments for minimal comments (check/check+/check-).
Less formal writing assignments that are primarily to check student reading or to provide comments or questions for class do not need elaborate feedback.

6. Note symptomatic problems as you read papers.
Discuss these problems in front of the class when you return the papers. This saves you from making separate comments on every paper.

7. Have reasonable expectations about your own effort in teaching writing.
Teaching writing is extremely labor intensive. It may take several semesters or even years to develop a system for teaching and evaluating student writing.