Grading Essays in English
101
Ultimately, individual instructors decide which
grade to give an essay. The English 101 Committee wishes, however,
to give as much guidance about criteria for grades as is possible
without dictating how instructors should grade essays. Toward that
end, the committee offers the following set of criteria. These are
built upon eight categories: content, audience and purpose, focus
and organization, balance of abstract and concrete elements, style,
grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and diction.
A C essay: an essay that meets minimum requirements of
competent, adequate writing for English 101 shows the following
features:
- Interesting or sensible, if somewhat self-evident,
content;
- A discernible central idea or thesis and an
adequate sense of both purpose and audience;
- A structure that is generally unified around
a central idea or thesis, is organized, and is without serious
transitional gaps;
- Abstractions that are usually balanced by
supporting and clarifying detail;
- Generally clear prose that is not excessively
wordy or burdened with cliches and that uses a variety of sentence
structures (this variety should be sufficient to indicate that
the writer is aware of basic options for arranging grammatical
structures-e.g., the use of simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex
sentences);
- Sentences that are relatively free of errors
in such grammatical basics as subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent
agreement, verb forms and tenses, modification, and case;
- Punctuation, spelling, and other mechanical
errors that only occasionally detract either from the clarity
of sentences or the image of a competent, educated writer; and
- Diction that is, in general, rhetorically
appropriate and accurate.
A B essay: an essay that is above average, shows these
features:
- Content that is interesting and shows some
originality in conception and development;
- A clear and consistent focus and careful attention
to the relationship between a writer's purpose and methods of
accomplishing that purpose with the audience;
- A purposefully organized and coherent pattern
of ideas;
- Abstractions that are consistently and adequately
balanced with supporting and clarifying details;
- Prose that is lively, varied, and dependent
upon sentences that use complex grammatical structures to convey
relatively fine shades of meaning and rhetorical sensitivity;
- Prose that is virtually free of serious grammatical
errors (such as those listed in point five of the description
of a C paper);
- Punctuation that is used purposefully in sentences
that are relatively free of spelling and other mechanical errors;
and
- Diction that is appropriate for the essay's
rhetorical situation and is occasionally felicitous.
An A essay: an excellent essay in English 101 is characterized
by the following features:
- Insights and ideas that are striking, significant,
and illuminating;
- Vividly sharp focus, masterful command of
purpose, and agile strategies to accomplish that purpose with
the audience;
- A compellingly patterned, seamlessly coherent
structure;
- Abstractions that are substantiated with aptly
chosen and deftly integrated concrete details;
- Advanced stylistic skills, evidenced in the
use of parallel phrases and clauses, periodic structures, cumulative
sentences, and other grammatically complex forms used effectively
for rhetorical goals;
- Virtually error-free prose;
- Punctuation that is used rhetorically, for
effect as well as clarity; and
- Diction that is precise, inventive, and felicitous.
A D or F essay shows one or more of the following
features:
- Content that ranges from the barren to the
superficial;
- Focus that is blurred by a failure to establish
a central idea or thesis and that has little recognizable sense
of purpose or audience;
- Structure that wanders aimlessly or has an
appearance of form without the development that makes parts a
whole, that suffers from transitional chasms;
- Abstractions that are strung together without
sufficient or appropriate detail to clarify and defend the assertions;
- Style that is weakened by convoluted sentences
or by monotonously safe reliance on simple sentences;
- Flaws in or confusions about elementary grammatical
patterns;
- Repeated failure to make correct distinctions
among such marks of punctuation as periods, commas, and semicolons;
or numerous mechanical errors;
- A failure to use language precisely.
The English 101 Committee occasionally conducts
grading sessions for the purpose of coming to general agreement
on grading standards. The Director of English 101 has copies of
essays graded by colleagues, and any English 101 instructor may
consult those examples. |
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