I cannot think of a better way to approach the horror show that's grading.
Tangent: As my son came up through public schooling, I was low-grade horrified at how grading in things like English lit/reading/writing is now very strictly based on rubrics, which they obligingly hand out: so many points for this, so many points for that. I didn't tell Chun Woo till he graduated high school that I would have crashed and burned with that kind of tacky-tacky grading. As it was, I talked him through producing The Five Paragraph Essay as like building a model very meticulously, toward producing longer work and then producing looser work if it better fit what you want to say. And that no one told me that way, and maybe it wouldn't have helped me, but I could assure him that it was better to suck it up and learn what you can learn from it, instead of fighting it indignantly the way I did.
Tangent on tangent: Today we start the drive to Oregon, where he will begin his first year of university.
Oh! Go, Chun Woo! In my honors class, the students seem to very much want more structure and rubrics, and I give them neither. This isn't a fill-in-the-blank world.
Several years ago I thought that maybe I could do proofreading as a retirement income stream. I signed up to take online classes from a fairly reputable university and sailed through the first class on correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Then we got to the heavy stuff. I never grasped the idea of rewriting the author's words without changing the author's "voice," at least not to the instructor's satisfaction. I made notes/comments/queries to the author when I shouldn't have, and omitted them when I should have made them. I concluded that, as a non-English major, I made a pretty good software engineer, but proofreading was not in my future. I commend you for taking on the task of teaching it!
I just have one piece of unsolicited advice Susan. Don't be afraid to be tough. The teachers I remember, the ones I love, were the ones who were the toughest. You can be fair and you can be kind and still be tough.
As a medical trade magazine editor for 20 years, I taught (mostly) younger people how to write magazine articles. I'm sure preserving their voice would have made me popular with the writers. But I took pretty much the opposite approach. In all but a very few select cases, I absolutely destroyed our writers' voices. Almost all of them needed to unlearn the bullshit they'd learned in college. We razed that crap to the ground. Then we went about rebuilding in a stronger fashion.
I taught our writers that the most important objective by far was making sure we were actually addressing a reader need--that our work would make a difference. I told them that they needed to worry about doing the right things before they worried about doing things right. You can write the greatest article that's ever been written about how to make a great seaweed martini, say, but if no one cares and no one reads you've wasted your time. We happened to be writing for doctors, so I required our writers to spend a fair amount of time following physicians around in clinic and in the OR. I needed our story ideas to come from the real world, not from thin air. And during working hours, I wanted our writers to try to see the world the way our readers saw it. Be the reader, I told them.
Second most important was what I'll call the reporting/analysis process. Once the writer had identified the question he/she was trying to answer for the readers, go forth and ask people in the know to help you. Ask dumb questions. Ask people to repeat themselves. Ask them to explain it as they would do so to their 12-year-old child. Make sure you thoroughly understand the answers--don't depend on the reader.
Blob out what you found out on paper and then organize it topically, chronologically, inverted pyramid or whatever is most appropriate, just organize it in a logical way. That's how you'll find your holes. Go back and do the reporting to backfill those holes.
When it came to the actual writing, I asked the writers to write in the magazine's voice, not their own. They needed to remember that they were dealing with an impatient reader. We are always always competing for their attention. Eliminate or at least minimize self-indulgent flourishes. Murder all darlings. Work hard to keep the reader's interest throughout the narrative. Eliminate "off-ramps." Use short declarative sentences and short words that score well on the Flesch index. Absolutely no passive voice.
Could they use lively prose, evocative words and spicy quotes? Absolutely, but only after they had satisfied the first requirements. Could they try breaking the rules? Absolutely, but only after they showed me that they understood and could follow the rules.
As you might imagine, I was very unpopular. I even had a very bad reputation around our company (which was owned by ABC Disney). No writers from other magazines ever came to work for me. And yet our publication always won the industry readership studies and the lion's share of the editorial awards. The achievement of which I'm most proud: four or five of my writers went on to become editors themselves, and several of them are still doing the work today. It's such a fun job. I hope a bunch of your students do end up going into journalism. It is truly a wonderful profession.
Ha. Different strokes. Please don't think my ambivalence about grading equates being an easy teacher. I always try to be fair, but my goal isn't to be liked, but to make students think, and to make them better writers. Everything else is just dogma.
I didn't mean to stop replying and am too lazy to delete and start over. I had incredibly tough editors early on and they made all the difference. I insist on ethical acts, and I insist on honesty in reporting. But it's been very rewarding to have students react to their own skills and to build on those, and then broaden their reach. I'm not sure I'm doing this right, but I sure am enjoying it.
Love this! I learned so much from my students over many years. Once I realized we all teach each other, life became more blissful and fruitful! I love your enthusiasm for the work and for your students!! The world needs teachers like you. Thank you!
I steal a lot of ideas from smarter teachers and you know what? Some of my best lessons come to me on the way to work. Never going home, always going to work.
No surprise: I agree with EVERYTHING you write here since I'm a full-time teacher who writes op-eds on the side. (We're kind of the inverse of each other. Or something.) I especially like this point: "...the gray areas are where the fun begins." I guess that's why I teach English (including journalism and media literacy). Thanks for this piece, Susan. It's a necessary reminder for why I do what I do as I begin my 33rd year!
I do not give extra credit. I require the work to be done sufficiently and on time. Why the hell would I sign up for more grading.
And yes. A lot of these students come loaded for bear. They do their own research. They apply critical thinking. They teach me stuff.
One student brought in a mistaken order (not the thing he wanted) from Dunkin, which I accepted and did not apply to his grade. I'll take the free food, sure. You still got a C.
I cannot think of a better way to approach the horror show that's grading.
Tangent: As my son came up through public schooling, I was low-grade horrified at how grading in things like English lit/reading/writing is now very strictly based on rubrics, which they obligingly hand out: so many points for this, so many points for that. I didn't tell Chun Woo till he graduated high school that I would have crashed and burned with that kind of tacky-tacky grading. As it was, I talked him through producing The Five Paragraph Essay as like building a model very meticulously, toward producing longer work and then producing looser work if it better fit what you want to say. And that no one told me that way, and maybe it wouldn't have helped me, but I could assure him that it was better to suck it up and learn what you can learn from it, instead of fighting it indignantly the way I did.
Tangent on tangent: Today we start the drive to Oregon, where he will begin his first year of university.
Oh! Go, Chun Woo! In my honors class, the students seem to very much want more structure and rubrics, and I give them neither. This isn't a fill-in-the-blank world.
Several years ago I thought that maybe I could do proofreading as a retirement income stream. I signed up to take online classes from a fairly reputable university and sailed through the first class on correcting grammar, punctuation, and spelling. Then we got to the heavy stuff. I never grasped the idea of rewriting the author's words without changing the author's "voice," at least not to the instructor's satisfaction. I made notes/comments/queries to the author when I shouldn't have, and omitted them when I should have made them. I concluded that, as a non-English major, I made a pretty good software engineer, but proofreading was not in my future. I commend you for taking on the task of teaching it!
It's a real skill, not messing with the voice. I struggle with that myself, sometimes, when I'm editing.
I just have one piece of unsolicited advice Susan. Don't be afraid to be tough. The teachers I remember, the ones I love, were the ones who were the toughest. You can be fair and you can be kind and still be tough.
As a medical trade magazine editor for 20 years, I taught (mostly) younger people how to write magazine articles. I'm sure preserving their voice would have made me popular with the writers. But I took pretty much the opposite approach. In all but a very few select cases, I absolutely destroyed our writers' voices. Almost all of them needed to unlearn the bullshit they'd learned in college. We razed that crap to the ground. Then we went about rebuilding in a stronger fashion.
I taught our writers that the most important objective by far was making sure we were actually addressing a reader need--that our work would make a difference. I told them that they needed to worry about doing the right things before they worried about doing things right. You can write the greatest article that's ever been written about how to make a great seaweed martini, say, but if no one cares and no one reads you've wasted your time. We happened to be writing for doctors, so I required our writers to spend a fair amount of time following physicians around in clinic and in the OR. I needed our story ideas to come from the real world, not from thin air. And during working hours, I wanted our writers to try to see the world the way our readers saw it. Be the reader, I told them.
Second most important was what I'll call the reporting/analysis process. Once the writer had identified the question he/she was trying to answer for the readers, go forth and ask people in the know to help you. Ask dumb questions. Ask people to repeat themselves. Ask them to explain it as they would do so to their 12-year-old child. Make sure you thoroughly understand the answers--don't depend on the reader.
Blob out what you found out on paper and then organize it topically, chronologically, inverted pyramid or whatever is most appropriate, just organize it in a logical way. That's how you'll find your holes. Go back and do the reporting to backfill those holes.
When it came to the actual writing, I asked the writers to write in the magazine's voice, not their own. They needed to remember that they were dealing with an impatient reader. We are always always competing for their attention. Eliminate or at least minimize self-indulgent flourishes. Murder all darlings. Work hard to keep the reader's interest throughout the narrative. Eliminate "off-ramps." Use short declarative sentences and short words that score well on the Flesch index. Absolutely no passive voice.
Could they use lively prose, evocative words and spicy quotes? Absolutely, but only after they had satisfied the first requirements. Could they try breaking the rules? Absolutely, but only after they showed me that they understood and could follow the rules.
As you might imagine, I was very unpopular. I even had a very bad reputation around our company (which was owned by ABC Disney). No writers from other magazines ever came to work for me. And yet our publication always won the industry readership studies and the lion's share of the editorial awards. The achievement of which I'm most proud: four or five of my writers went on to become editors themselves, and several of them are still doing the work today. It's such a fun job. I hope a bunch of your students do end up going into journalism. It is truly a wonderful profession.
Ha. Different strokes. Please don't think my ambivalence about grading equates being an easy teacher. I always try to be fair, but my goal isn't to be liked, but to make students think, and to make them better writers. Everything else is just dogma.
I didn't mean to stop replying and am too lazy to delete and start over. I had incredibly tough editors early on and they made all the difference. I insist on ethical acts, and I insist on honesty in reporting. But it's been very rewarding to have students react to their own skills and to build on those, and then broaden their reach. I'm not sure I'm doing this right, but I sure am enjoying it.
Well done!
Ha. Since that posted, I'm behind again. Whee!
Love this! I learned so much from my students over many years. Once I realized we all teach each other, life became more blissful and fruitful! I love your enthusiasm for the work and for your students!! The world needs teachers like you. Thank you!
I'm lucky to be there.
Susan, your teaching methods sound inspiring and exciting, I wish I had more of your methods and goals when I was teaching (English, French, Nursing).
I steal a lot of ideas from smarter teachers and you know what? Some of my best lessons come to me on the way to work. Never going home, always going to work.
No surprise: I agree with EVERYTHING you write here since I'm a full-time teacher who writes op-eds on the side. (We're kind of the inverse of each other. Or something.) I especially like this point: "...the gray areas are where the fun begins." I guess that's why I teach English (including journalism and media literacy). Thanks for this piece, Susan. It's a necessary reminder for why I do what I do as I begin my 33rd year!
Good Lord. 33 years. What is WRONG with you?*
*Rhetorical question. Rock on, my friend.
🤣
Thanks for your service !! Keep up the good work Jim
And thank you for yours.
Do any of your students go above and beyond , and if so , do you give extra credit ????
Also , do bribes work at getting better grade’s , and if so , what is the best way to bribe you???
I do not give extra credit. I require the work to be done sufficiently and on time. Why the hell would I sign up for more grading.
And yes. A lot of these students come loaded for bear. They do their own research. They apply critical thinking. They teach me stuff.
One student brought in a mistaken order (not the thing he wanted) from Dunkin, which I accepted and did not apply to his grade. I'll take the free food, sure. You still got a C.
I hope you at least gave him an atta boy
I thanked him sweetly and let him know I do not change my behavior for bribes.