Welcome to Dana's blog!

Grading writing assignments

Let me preface this by saying that Dini has a degree in English and taught college freshman. ;) And I asked her for help!LOL

Dini's Writing Assessment Tips for Homeschooling Parents (Doesn't that sound nice and official? LOL!)

There are four main areas to assess a student's writing on: Content, Organization, Expression, and Mechanics. Depending on the purpose of the assignment and the child's age or stage, you can give different weight to each of these areas.

Content is exactly what it sounds like: the content of the paper. Did the student fulfill the assigned purpose? Did he use enough sources, if it is a research paper? Are his arguments sound, if it is a persuasive paper? Did he demonstrate an understanding of his topic? Did he consider his audience in choosing his topic and/or approach? Some or all of these questions, plus others you may think of will help you to assess this area.

Organization deals with issues such as paragraphing, appropriate intro and conclusion, and transitions. Basically, you are looking for a logical flow to the paper, without abrupt or choppy transitions between ideas or points. This is not an area to emphasize heavily with very young writers, but as they develop, you can begin to teach these things. Work on things like topic sentences, parallelism, transitions, paragraph cohesiveness, and introduce the no fail 5-paragraph paper.

Expression is where you deal with things like word choice, sentence length, and overuse of cliches. I am sure you recognize awkwardness, choppiness or wordiness, but again, unless you have taught your student about these issues and ways to avoid them, it really isn't fair to mark them down for them. When you see them in a paper, often these are things that are best dealt with in a joint editing session, where you sit side-by-side and say, "Hmmmm, I like your point here, but the way you said it doesn't work for me. Let's see if we can come up with a different way to express that thought, so your reader doesn't miss it!"

Mechanics are issues of spelling, punctuation, grammar, etc. Unless the whole purpose of a paper is to demonstrate something learned in grammar class, or some form of punctuation or capitalization (which very well may be the case in the lower grades), this usually isn't weighted as heavily as content. However, if these things interfere with the reader's ability to read and understand the paper, you do need to address them.

Weight the four areas according to the assignment. As students get older, and once they are writing in college or writing for subjects other than English, content usually ends up being worth as much as 40% of the grade, with organization following closely at 30%, provided your child is old enough to organize. Expression is generally 20% in college, while mechanics in the content areas may be worth only 10%. However, with young children, you will probably want to put way more emphasis on mechanics and organization, two things you can teach. Teaching expression is possible, but not easy, since many young writers feel like you are attacking them if you attack their wording. Content sometimes suffers if you put too much emphasis on mechanics and organization, so let your young writer know up front how you are weighting each of the areas.

Okay, hope some of that helped...