Grading Standards for English 180 Writing Assignments
How a paper is graded – no matter what the course – always depends on a number of factors. Sometimes these factors may seem mysterious, as if the instructor puts the essay into a blinking, whirring machine and it comes out graded without anyone knowing what has happened.
That may be true in science fiction, but most instructors will tell you that they have clear standards and expectations as readers and as teachers that they apply to all writing assignments. These often vary according to things like the level of the course, the nature of the assignment, and the time allowed to complete the paper. Meet those expectations, conform to those standards, and you will do fine. Ignore them, violate them, or otherwise blow off the assignment, and you will not fare well at all.
To give you some sense of the standards and expectations I apply to the out-of-class writing assignments you will complete for English 180, here are the general guidelines. Assuming that every essay is worth a total of 100 points (or 100%), the grade breaks down into these approximate values:
10 10 25 25 10 15 5 100
From this, you can see that a paper that is based on a really good idea, is well organized, and has a lot of interesting evidence can still come out at only the minimal “C” level if the grammar and spelling are a mess, and if the author failed to follow the directions for the assignment. On the other hand, a grammatically and mechanically perfect paper may fall well short of an “A” (or a “B”) if it is dull as ditchwater, poorly organized, and logically weak. Really good university-level writing is both “correct” and lively.
Like a good story, a good essay engages its reader by providing the reader, again and again, with reasons to keep going. It holds the attention by offering interesting, insightful ideas and a good array of logically compelling supporting evidence for its author’s opinions and judgments.
Finally, a word on quoting. Cite all quotations from our textbook simply by referring to the word or passage (whether you actually quote it or simply paraphrase it) with a page number in parentheses, like this (p. 300). More important, quote selectively. Don’t quote whole sentences (or even more!) when you really want to call attention to just a word or a phrase. You have fewer than 900 words available for your essay (that is approximately the same number of words as there are in this description of the assignment!); don’t waste them on “filler.” Get right to the point: cite precisely what proves or illustrates your point, nothing more.
Because the quotations you will be using will necessarily be short, don’t indent them in your text. Instead, simply insert them right into your discussion, using the parenthetical references described above.
Do I need to say proofread? Don’t just depend on your word processor’s spell checker; it can spell the words correctly, but it can’t tell whether those are the right words!
Stephen C. Behrendt, 8/1/14