Guidelines for correcting written work

1. Use something other than a red pen to mark with!
2. Underline the error in the text. Underline where the problem is.
3. Don’t over correct - Decide which are the most important type of errors to work on at the moment and draw attention only to these. E.g. if the students have just written a biography, then probably what you would concentrate on would be the use of past tense verbs and time expressions. Other errors can be dealt with at another time.
4. Add a comment at the bottom to praise and give students points to work on.
5. Students have (with training) ability and willingness to self-correct and correct for their partners (peer correction), so put students into pairs or groups to read and correct each others work. But again, remember that you need to get the students to focus on a particular type of error otherwise they will overcorrect.
6. To develop student autonomy, self and peer correction is crucial. The teacher should, however, train students with correction symbols/ codes or a marking scale.
7. Use ticks for “good points”. It really encourages students to write.
8. A nice idea is to use errors from a number of different students’ writing to devise an exercise, quiz or game.

A correction code
 

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