Return of the Green Pen

Every semester, I look forward with a mixture of dread and curiosity to the first set of essays I get from my students. Particularly in Eng Comp 101, the essays can reveal personal tidbits about the students’ lives. I am frequently saddened, and sometimes even shocked, by some of the circumstances these young people are dealing with.

So, I have now finished grading the first essay for the semester. I always use writing prompts—for several reasons. First, if I do a good job crafting the prompt, it makes it far less likely that the student can find a ready made essay to hand in as his own. Second, if all the students are writing about generally the same topic, I have a greater opportunity to evaluate them fairly in comparison to their peers.

The first writing prompt was to write a NARRATIVE or a DESCRIPTIVE paper on one of two topics: personal body modifications OR fasting for a personal reason.

Once I get this first set of papers, I brace myself. What odd word errors am I going to read? And how tainted will my own writing be after reading these freshmen essays? On this second issue, I frequently find myself making simple elementary errors after I grade a set of essays. An example would be confusing where to place an apostrophe to make a noun possessive. Students ALWAYS have trouble with making nouns plural, and then making plural nouns possessive. Is it the students’ papers or the student’s papers? Well, of course, you know it depends on context—did you mean the papers of all the students? Or all the papers of the student.

Perhaps the most common error I come upon is confusion in homophones. You know what a homophone is even if you don’t know the term. Simply, “Homophones are words of the same language that are pronounced alike even if they differ in spelling, meaning” Source.

I do get some very amusing homophones. The most common ones are words like NO and KNOW. Or THEIR, THERE, and THEY’RE.

Here are a few of my favorites.
THEN and THAN.
ACCEPT and EXCEPT.
ALTER and ALTAR.
SHUDDER and SHUTTER.

This isn’t exactly a homophone, but it was a near one.
ALTERATION and ALTERCATION.
So students writing about body alterations were actually using the word “altercation.” A bit of a different meaning.

In addition to bracing myself for these word confusions, I always steel myself for some of the more problematic details I will encounter. Clearly, eighteen year olds today view body modifications as very much the norm. They write about multiple piercings, or getting a second or third tattoo. I really cringe when a student writes about tongue-splitting. (I do get a small modicum of revenge when we start a discussion unit of clothing and body adornments around the world. I use photographs of some of the examples of stretched necks, or plate-sized lips, or ear-lobes elongated down to the shoulders. Students are always stunned to see photos of foot-binding. Then I innocently ask—well, what’s the difference between that and some of the body modifications you make?)

Occasionally, I have a student who sees beyond the obvious on this topic, and writes refreshingly on his experience. One student wrote about trying to decide what to do about premature balding. I loved the essay. Another student wrote about getting a military haircut upon enlisting in the Army. He understood that the haircut symbolized all that joining the military entails.

For the first time with these papers, I had a fair number of students selecting the fasting topic. In the past, I have had one or two students a semester use this topic. This set of essays there were about a dozen, including one student who is a Jain and talked about the Paryshuna Festival, which includes fasting, meditation and prayer. Considering I live in central Pennsylvania which is a fairly conservative area, I was pleased to have a student who provided an informative well-thought essay from a different perspective.

Tomorrow will be the weeping day. I return the essays with all my green marks (I eschew using a red pen, and choose a green one instead). I also include a grading matrix. But, no matter how objectively I might have tried to be in relaying the issues with a student’s writing, students who expected higher grades are dashed. I find returning these first essays as the watershed mark—students will either hang in with me, trying to improve their writing, or they will blow off the whole course.