Picture this – you arrive at work at 8.00am to attend a staff meeting. You teach eight classes for the day and eat your lunch while on yard duty. After school you have another two meetings, along with calling five or so parents and reading about 100 pointless internal emails. Come 5.00pm you haven’t even planned for tomorrow’s classes, when you realise you have to mark those English assignments. Welcome to an average day for any English teacher.

Marking English assignments is not as easy as marking a math’s test. You can’t just tick and cross and add up the score at the end like the math’s teachers do. With English you have to read every word. Years ago I had a student who wrote a line of swear words in his English essay because he wanted to test if I read the whole thing. I did. I found them. He failed.

So to continue our teacher’s day. By the time I get home, interact with the family, have dinner and then sit down to relax and mark the assignments, it is already 8.30pm. I am tired and quite frankly don’t want to mark the assignments, but I have to. My criteria for marking the assignment is roughly the same as any other – technical (does it answer the question?), structural (is it appropriately set out?) and grammatical (spelling, punctuation, word usage etc.).

Believe it or not, you have the opportunity to improve your mark despite what you write. That’s right – you can achieve a better mark by following some simple rules that have nothing to do with the actual content of the piece. What’s that you say – I have never been told this before? Well, yes you have, but you never listened. Any teacher worth their registration with tell you to edit your work before you hand it in, but I have lost count of the times I have written on a student’s work “did you edit this?”

So it is 8.30pm and I am proofreading assignments. The first one I pick up is OK, but there are many spelling, grammar and punctuation errors and I have to stop reading continually to circle them. In the end I almost forget what they have actually written and it takes me 10 minutes to read. The second one I pick up does not contain the depth of content of the other, but it is well written with no mistakes. It flows seamlessly and takes me five minutes to read. Who gets the better mark? I’ll leave that up to you to guess – remember it is English and not debating.

To conclude, follow these rules.

1. Thoroughly spell check your writing using the Australian version on the computer.  
2. Read the question sheet again, then read your assignment and make sure you have answered it. 
3. Have you followed the right structure? eg. Intro, body, conclusion. 
4. Does the writing make sense? eg. Sentences flow logically. 
5. Is the punctuation correct?