Sometimes when you are writing exams in class, writing as fast as you can under time pressure, you forget there is a person actually reading the exam. You are writing for an audience. 

There are things you can do - such as writing clearly, creating a concrete introduction and showing creativity with the material - that will help your audience by making your essay more readable. The result will probably help your grade. 

To give you a sense of what's going through the mind of someone facing an unmarked stack of papers, American Studies TA Kelly Willis Mendiola kept a short diary on one recent grading foray. 

Monday, 9:30 a.m. 

It’s a gorgeous spring day outside and I’m sitting down at my kitchen table to grade a large batch of essay questions—57 exams of four essay questions each, a total of 228 essays. I have a week to grade them all. As is my tendency with daunting tasks, I’m having a little trouble getting rolling. 

I am lucky enough to begin with a good essay. This student states exactly where she’s going in the first paragraph which makes the essay easy to follow. 

Instead of grading each exam separately I am grading all the answers to each question at one time in order to grade as consistently as possible. The down-side of this method is that I am reading the same thing over and over which can get boring. 

At the review session for this exam I emphasized organization, something a lot of people had problems with on the last exam. A lot of people are trying to improve their organization on this exam, which is heartening, but many seem to have missed the point. They are writing introductory paragraphs, but making them too general to be useful. The purpose of introductory paragraphs is to make essays easier to read—they state clearly exactly where the essay is going and allow the reader to quickly see what line of reasoning the essay will follow and what its main points will be. The statement "This paper will discuss similarities and differences" without immediately listing those similarities and differences simply doesn’t give me enough information to be a useful introduction. 

I’m also getting tired of reading thesis statements like "The show was famous for many things," "Thomas Ince had a huge impact" or "Their significance is great and unprecedented" which really tell me that the person either was too lazy or didn’t know enough information to make a specific thesis statement that serves as an umbrella for the essay. 

Tuesday 10:00 a.m. 

It’s my second day of grading, this time in a library cubicle where I’ll be less distracted by the wind blowing in the grass. I need to make good progress on grading today but am getting slowed down by exams like this one. It reads like a summary of the person’s notes. It tells me everything the student knows about the subject but doesn’t provide any analysis, which in this case should have involved a comparison of two different groups. Instead of choosing key aspects of the two groups to compare, this essay merely describes the two groups, perhaps assuming that the connections are obvious. They aren’t. 

Tuesday, 2:00 p.m. 

What a relief, some creativity. I just read a clever essay imagining "Little Big Man" as a woman. I was similarly pleased when a student answered one of the really tough questions we never really discussed in class. His essay offered thoughtful speculations on why western films have been virtually sexless while pulp western magazines lured readers with cover images of scantily clad women. Most people avoid these questions because they involve more risk than the questions with clear right and wrong answers, but I think people should get some credit for taking the risk, which is what education is all about. Every once in a while a student unwittingly makes me laugh. One person repeatedly referred to George Armstrong Custer as Custard. 

Thursday, 3:00 p.m. 

I am getting tired of reading these exams and my hayfever is bothering me. I am losing patience with essays like this one which is full of unsupportable generalities like "Although this photographer’s method of photographing Indians’ every day life was based on stereotypes he still gave the public what they wanted to see" or "His paintings come to life because they’re filled with so much emotion that we look to them with respect and admiration." Be specific! 

Friday, 11:00 a.m. 

I usually begin grading feeling sympathetic toward students. I want them to do well. But there are certain essays which really irritate me. I begin to feel particularly grumpy when I read essays in which it is clear the person hasn’t studied—they get basic facts wrong or don’t use specific examples—and they are obviously trying to fake me out with big words and useless generalities. 

Friday, 4:00 p.m. 

I am sitting in a library cubicle looking wearily at a big pile of graded blue books. My brain feels numb from hours of concentrated reading. Even though I have read all the exams and commented on each one I still see grading as a somewhat arbitrary process, like any subjective evaluation.  I am always worried that students will see their grades as some measure of their worth rather than what they are— one person’s reactions to their writing. I think of the essay exam as a rare opportunity for people to get individual feedback on their writing and ideas. I hope I’ve not wasted my time by commenting on each essay, that people will read and think about my comments. If they do, this long journey has been worth it.