I was struck by Curzan/Damour's bit on Problem Solving Mode- the temptation to suggest very specific improvements in papers. This is probably familiar to anyone who's done tutoring! As an instructor grading papers it might be even harder to avoid, since your goal in teaching the course is to improve their writing...offering constructive advice is what we do. I agree that this is a trap to avoid, but how do you avoid it and still feel you've given them enough to go on? A student might come back saying your comments are too vague. Anyway, it seems like a narrow path to walk between not enough and too much.
From Bean: I like the holistic grading approach; it's much more in line with my college instructors, and may help to sharpen the delineation between high school writing (in which I almost always had very compartmentalized analytic grading) and college writing. One way to blend the two (similar in effect to the letter grade catechism on p. 264) is to comment analytically -- addressing various important areas like thesis, organization, style, and then grade on overall effect. I can see how a paper that's technically sound, organized well, but uninspired in concept will be inferior to a paper that is unorganized but has brilliant ideas, at least in the first submission round.
The discussion of grading in both books has the drawback of not strictly applying to the English 1000 structure, in which revision is _required_. Our grades and especially comments need to take this into account. In addition, we need to think of ways to encourage revision in papers that were pretty good in first submission form- "good" writers can get complacent in a hurry.
Joe
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