Generally, there are few things that unite teachers more than a mutual aversion to grading. For some, the marking up of assignments and assigning of earned grades may be a mere annoyance; for others, the unavoidable nature of subjectivity inherent to that process, plus the amount of feedback necessary, multiplied by the time consumed makes for one distasteful equation. That being said, there are few things that further divide instructors of all stripes than asking them their preferred method for how to grade.

Those working and teaching in the humanities often find themselves faced with a number of different challenges in this regard, especially when considering what is most deserving of their attention. What can be done if a student writes a fair essay somewhat adjacent to the given prompt or topic, but for one reason or another, manages to completely miss the mark?  Does it bear repeating to stay away from broad and overly generic opening sentences proclaiming, “History has shown” or “Long has it been known” — or my particular favorite, “Since the dawn of time?” How many times can I point a student toward the multitude of online and print resources for proper MLA formatting, guidelines, and citations? How much time will a student truly take to run an eye over every correction of tense usage, verb-noun agreement, and improper uses of punctuation? (If by chance you are an individual who happens to enjoy grading, don’t hesitate to read on! This is neither a how-to guide for grammar police or self-proclaimed linguistic authorities of any kind, nor a tirade against the trials of reading the — occasionally trying, sometimes brilliant — work of our students. After all, aren’t we all still students ourselves, one way or another?)

In the papers of students past, present, and possibly future, two of the most common points of critique I have can be summarized by: 1) the structuring of sentences through passive versus active voice, and 2) the building and presentation of an argument.

The use of passive voice appears in a sentence where the subject receives an action, and is acted upon. In student papers, this typically reads as some variation of the following:

a form of to-be + verb

To correct this, one would remove the to-be, change the verb into its active form, and restructure the sentence so that the subject may perform the action. For example:

British women over the age of thirty were given the right to vote in 1918.

In 1918, Parliament granted British women over the age of thirty the right to vote.

Active voice encourages students to name a subject, focus on the responsibility of giving or performing that action, and keeps their prose from becoming cluttered with what I tend to call passive-aggressive voice. And yet as we all know, the use of active voice over passive voice is not a golden standard or an absolute requirement, but rather a suggestion to which there exist many exceptions to the rule.

On a larger scale, students have also tended to struggle with how to structure and organize an argument. “What is a claim?” they will ask. “Is it the same as an argument, or is it something different? Does this paper need a thesis statement? Is this too broad or too narrow? What do I do when I want to write about everything?”

Why are all of you so keen on restating the plot and leaving less room for your own original arguments? would be my common refrain, although it answers none of their questions. Usually, this cannot be achieved in a brief couple of paragraphs that comprise feedback on a student essay; this takes weeks of practice, and more than a semester of revising.

No matter the age difference or the amount of years we have spent writing, it seems we always need a group of readers to help take our draft, and then take it apart at different levels. My current dissertation committee consists of my main advisor, and two readers. The other two readers I have yet to approach, but at the moment, three are enough to take those same questions and turn them back my way.

• What is your thesis?

• Why have you close-read for ten pages, and left so little room for your own analysis?

• Footnote these critical arguments; you want your own to appear in the foreground, and for those to act as secondary support.

• Start with your largest claim, after which follow subsequent, subordinating, and scaffolding arguments.

Just this week, one of my readers warned me against using “ideological” when I meant “discursive,” due to the amount of baggage and theoretical weight the former carries with it. Maybe I’ll think of this the next time I circle a term or a phrase in a student essay and comment awkward wording. Yes, diagramming a sentence is difficult for most human beings, and no one likes verb conjugations in any language. Things like active voice and proper semicolon use can be taught or corrected; misspellings and comma splices happen even to the best of us.

Every writer can make use of an editor. 

It becomes much more difficult to show ourselves the same compassion when we think of writing as a skill, and one that we must have gotten good at by now; surely. Look at the years that have passed since undergraduate study! Look at the number of papers we have written. Pages upon pages of claims, material evidence, logical argumentation, and careful citation – how can we still look at an empty Word document with its blinking cursor and not know what to do next?

Truth be told, easily. But it is also fairly easy to accept that sometimes the mind falls fallow, for a season or for a day. Give it time. Give yourself some time.  

Perhaps one of the best lessons the dissertation process teaches us as graduate students is not another grammar admonition, but a good dose of humility and a flashback to the passive-voiced, plot-summarizing, incorrect-formatting student we all once used to be, and perhaps still are.

(Stop being afraid of using to be runs a close second.)

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

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Here I crouch, sifting through environmentally-friendly litter and scooping out poops. Several paces away, my handsome tuxedo derpface sits primly, tail curled around his hind legs, silently judging. After I’ve bagged the waste and gone to wash my hands, he’ll wander over, sniff around the corners of the box, and stick a paw inside to dig through the litter once again. It’s his way of saying he’s unsatisfied with my removal methods and would much rather complete the process himself.

At multiple points throughout my academic career, I have found myself hovering over the metaphorical litter box of my own writing. This process involves sifting through sentences, deleting entire paragraphs here, rearranging the topic and transitional sentences there, and then saving the remains to multiple files with variations of the name “working draft,” “redraft,” and “revisions.” Sometimes, passing the draft off to a supervisor — of the four-legged and bewhiskered or the two-legged and tenured kind — brings a certain sense of relief; an unwinding of the knots at the base of the neck, a long-deserved nap, and maybe a celebratory binge-watching of The Great British Bake-Off while eating lemon curd straight from the jar. Other times, it’s a week or two of anxiously avoiding Microsoft Word, OneNote pad or Google Docs all together until receiving the marked up draft with more words (litter) outside the box than remaining in.

Yet working, writing, and waiting do not exist as the only known states of being throughout this process. Personally, from undergraduate days to Ph.D. Candidacy, it has been necessary for this process to evolve. At one point, you may switch over from clay-based to corn-based litter, judging the annoying tracking out of the box a fair exchange for the health of your cat. At another point, you may exchange regular plastic bags for biodegradable bags, and move the box under a window, for better ventilation. Sometimes your cat puts on a number of pounds, and simply outgrows their previous box.

As an undergraduate student, I never worked through multiple drafts. I was (and still am, to be perfectly candid) the “edit as you go” type, who can agonize over a single sentence for far too long before allowing myself to move onto the next. This, when combined with an obstinate preference for writing in chronological order — meaning I must come up with a title before the opening sentence, and then the opening sentence before the thesis statement, only after which could follow each claim alphabetically, A through D or so, all rounded out by a proper conclusion — was formulaic and time-consuming to a fault, but for papers which ranged from seven to thirteen pages, could be done. This quickly becomes inadvisable at the graduate school level, when faced with the task of writing three to four different twenty-five-page seminar papers within a span of three weeks.

When writing, we does what we must.

This is not to encourage you to completely overhaul your writing style or methods of putting words on the page; as I soon discovered, I cannot write a graduate seminar paper the same way that I write a conference paper full of exciting theoretical what-ifs; I do not write a blog post the same way that I approach a dissertation chapter. Although the ideas may generate from the same noggin, the style and manner of articulation must develop in a way that suits the substance. Not only does this apply to wrestling with other scholars over argumentation, citation, and analytical intervention, but consider other genres of writing you have been asked to adapt, with or without instruction. A proposal for a travel grant may take you half an hour to draft, while trying to compose a letter of recommendation for a student may take twice that time, as you trawl through the thesaurus for alternate ways to say “a pleasure to have in class.”

We’ve all heard the usual metaphors, and inhaled advice of innumerable flavors: writing is a marathon, not a sprint; here is how you write like an architect and here is how you write like a gardener. If you dedicate yourself to writing a consistent 500 words per day, no matter the level of quality of those words, you will commit yourself to writing like Neil Gaiman, or that Ph.D. candidate who miraculously managed to finish their dissertation a year ahead of schedule. One of my favorite exchanges between individuals who write spells out the differences quite candidly:

I have not come to you with a list of how-to’s or to reiterate the differences between this type of writer or that type of writer. At one point or another, we have all felt like Sisyphus (or perhaps a dung beetle?) rolling a rock of our own making up the steep hill of multiple drafts. But whether you start your day with a fresh cup of coffee, the morning sunrise, and hammering out six hundred words, or find yourself dashing out of the bathroom mid-shower, suds and all, to jot down a phrase before it leaves your brain forever, it’s important to take a moment for self-realization.

This is your sandbox. Full of your words. After all, you are the one with opposable thumbs, the ability to write, and with thoughts in your head. If you won’t attend to these, in whatever fashion you deem appropriate, no one else will.

Get to writing, y’all.

Vicky Cheng is a Ph.D. Candidate in Syracuse’s English Department. She studies Victorian literature and culture, with an emphasis on feminist and queer readings of the body. Her dissertation project explores alternate forms of embodied female re-production, refocused through the lens of queer regeneration.

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