How to Write Notes on a Student's Paper

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Laura Turner and today I'm going to talk to professors about how to write notes on a students paper. I would give the advice that you should never really write alot of handwritten notes on a student's paper because, if you're like me, you have very bad handwriting and especially when you've been grading lots of papers it's going to get even worse. I, and like many other professors that I have enjoyed in the past who have taught me, like to actually type up a written response to the student's paper. If they took enough time to write a 10 to 15 page paper for you, you can take enough time to write a one half page response typed to them. So after you've been through the paper, I think it's perfectly fine for you to give yourself notes along the margin that you can read yourself, because we all know we can read our own bad handwriting but no one else can. You just give yourself notes as you go through the paper. And then once you're done with the paper you can go back and look at those notes. This also forces you to read the paper a second time which makes you look at their paper and think about their grade a little more than you would, say, if you just ran through the paper writing down notes and then coming up with a grade at the end. So once you've compiled all your own notes from the paper, type up your notes to give to the student detailing in spots, like, "On page two where I saw that you had put a huge block of quotations and you had not commented on it, you just put it in there" and that you had written "No" out in the margin, or something like that. That you can use the typed page to sort of comment on your own comments for the student so that they don't have as many questions when they come away and they don't feel frustrated by what you've written on their paper. So, it's just a matter of really being very clear about your notes and not making it into a puzzle for the student."