Assignment

Assignment



Assignment

Part 1:

It will come as no surprise to those who review student writing that many college students demonstrate poor to mediocre writing skills. Poor writing is impacting business as well as academics, with many companies reporting substantial investments necessary to bring skills up to an acceptable level.

Given that the ability to communicate with clear, logical, articulate, consistent, and persuasive writing is undeniably important in the working world, it is imperative that we faculty provide effective feedback to help our students improve their writing. While it is true that academic writing is different than business writing, we can still arm our students with valuable writing skills that will carry over to their professional careers.

Many colleges and universities track success rates among students in their programs and find a very clear link between writing abilities and completion numbers. We can all help address the problem by enriching our courses with writing assignments so that students can build their skill sets throughout their academic program. Of course, grading writing is an onerous, time-consuming process. This article will help faculty across the curriculum manage the challenges of providing students with feedback about their writing.

When my tutor provided me with the feedback on my writing, it is advisable to follow a few basic guidelines so that the experience is as positive as it can be for both for me and my tutor. I noticed that my tutor always considers this points while giving feedbacks:

Provide me with clear grading rubrics and use them.

He never marks everything; it is overwhelming and ultimately counter-productive.

Sandwich his positive and negative comments; all writing does something well, so make certain begin and end feedback with the positives. Include the difficult-to-digest tough comments in the middle.

Track problem areas and make students accountable for repeat errors.

When you go through the actual review process, follow these steps:

Ideally, review a full class at a single sitting for an objective perspective. This kind of review permits you to see overall patterns and issues, which can guide how you facilitate the classroom.

Rotate sections and the order in which you read assignments from project to project. If you are teaching three online sections, for example, and you always begin with section 1 and go through section 3, it's likely your students are being evaluated differently. We tend to mark more stringently in the early part of our review process and less stringently toward the end! For some assignments grade section 1 first, then do section 2 first, and continue rotating.

Read through the whole assignment without marking anything. This step may seem to take a great deal of time, but getting the full picture before marking errors actually speeds up the process as you see patterns of errors.

Return to the beginning of the document and mark only the first occurrence of any given error. If there are sentence fragments, mark only the first one. Likewise, mark only the first run-on or apostrophe ...