Straub's Responding Article

One tip in the article that I found particularly important was the very first one. It states that we shouldn’t go too easy on the paper we’re grading; that we, as readers and graders, are merely doing so to help the writer improve. This is not an elementary school grading assignment where we pick out all the spelling errors. We, as graders, need to suggest better word choices, better structure and/or better transitions in the paper. The grader needs to keep in mind that it might not be the final draft, so they shouldn’t be too harsh. I like the fact that Straub addresses the fact that we should write as many praise statements as criticisms because I, like most other students I know, tend to focus too much on the bad parts of the paper. The writer needs to feel like they sort of did a good job on the paper. One tip that I did not find useful was the “Where to put the comments” section. To me, that tip is self-explanatory. A grader doesn’t want to write in the writer’s territory, the grader must write around it.