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Jerry Pinkham
College of Lake County
Course
Composition II, ENG 122, (3 semester hours) is designed to further the work begun in Composition I by giving
students more experience as writers and readers with various purposes in different contexts. Students write
analytical, research, and other advanced papers based on sources from literature and other texts.
Prerequisite: ENG 121
Description
Marking up papers is often the most time and labor-intensive task teachers face when it comes to helping students
improve their writing. Because of the unique nature of writing, composition exercises don't readily lend themselves
to pre-fabricated "improvement commentaries." As such, teachers usually find themselves making extensive hand-written
comments on every paper, every page, but thanks to the versatility of word processing programs, there's a quicker and
better way to address commonly reoccurring writing errors and thus greatly reduce the time and tedium teachers face in
the paper-grading process. While the color-coded error ID system described below won't eliminate the need for some
individualized writing-improvement suggestions, it does offer three major advantages: (1) it speeds up the commentary
process, (2) it highlights recurring writing problems, and (3) it provides students with a focused self-help guide to
correcting their writing weaknesses. Furthermore, teachers can easily modify this color-coded template to meet unique
requirements for their courses, from the elementary school writing class to the college level course. Best yet, this
system requires no technical expertise from either instructors or students. It's easy to use, simple to implement,
visually powerful, and wonderfully adaptable to all grade levels.
This template-based teacher commentary system uses basic word processing tools to speed up the process of
identifying and highlighting common writing problems when grading student composition exercises. Using teacher-chosen
colors, text highlighting, and text format options, this system helps teachers draw strong visual attention to a student's
specific writing weaknesses.
The example template system shown here uses 13 unique visual codes: five colors
(red, blue, green, purple, and brown), four highlight patterns (yellow, blue, green, and gray), and
three format options (boldface, italics, and underline), and one imbedded box note. Each code corresponds
to a user-created commentary template that identifies common writing errors. Color choices can be expanded
or shortened, and the corresponding comments can also be changed to suit individual course needs.
In short, the system works this way. Students start by submitting a word-processed paper on an individual
disk to the instructor. The instructor then reads and grades these files on his personal computer. When the teacher
identifies a common writing problem within a paper, he can then highlight that problem using a pre-chosen color-coded
error template system (see sample below). Any instructional suggestions outside the boundaries of the template can be
added at the end of the student's papers. The result is a paper with any common errors visually identified and
highlighted and keyed to an accompanying color code template.
This semi-automated process relieves teachers from having to identify and comment on commonly reoccurring writing
errors throughout the entire spread of papers. Grading time is greatly reduced, thus allowing the teacher more time to
focus on specific writing improvement suggestions for each student. When done, the teacher "saves" the marked up paper,
either by overwriting the original file or by saving the edited version as a new file, and returns the disk to the
student for review and possible paper revision.
Here's a sample template used to highlight common college-level writing errors.
| Red |
Thesis statement problem; thesis lacks clarity, focus, position, clear purpose, and/or
supporting rationale(s) for your position |
| Blue |
Unsupported (or insufficiently supported) position or statement |
| Green |
Unclear phrase or reference |
| Purple |
Spelling or word usage error |
| Brown |
Wordiness or irrelevant material (in relation to thesis or subtopic) |
| Yellow H |
Weakness in the current course lesson focus (e.g., idea development, detail, logic, support,
continuity, relevance, audience analysis, etc.)
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| Green H |
mechanical or punctuation error |
| Blue H |
Error in logic: hasty generalization, post hoc ergo propter hoc, begging the question,
genetic fallacy, circular argument, either/or fallacy, ad hominem, faulty analogy or comparison,
red herring/straw man, ad populum
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| Grey H |
Sentence fragment, or the opposite, a run-on sentence |
| Boldface |
A particularly serious problem (used with any color or highlighted text)
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| Note Insert |
Special-purpose note for individualized comments |
| Italics |
This needs attribution and/or you need to cite the original source. |
| Underline |
Grammatical or syntactical problem |
As noted above, an obvious option here is for teachers to use as many‹or as few‹color-based codes as
they may require for their individual course needs. Teachers can also customize their own specific comments
for the codes; and lastly, teachers can also create a variety of additional templates to address additional
course needs.
Transferability
The transferability of this color-code markup system is essentially unlimited for learning exercises on any academic
level. While outlined in this module as an instructional writing aid, the simplicity, flexibility, and visually powerful
nature of this system could be creatively adapted for use for a wide range of academic disciplines.
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