Having graded two rounds of essays, I've developed a nice long list of grammar pet peeves that never really bothered me before; now, as I'm reading student writing, I get this nervous twitch whenever pronouns disagree, or when I run into a run-on. Now I know why high school English teachers always look and act a little...well, off.
Seriously, I do start to get frustrated as I grade, because many of the problems are issues we have covered again and again in class, and I have to remind myself that two or three (...or ten...) brief discussions on sentence fragments in class aren't going to entirely eradicate fragments from their writing. Honestly, though, fragments and the which/that, who/whom issues don't bother me as much as problems like shifts in tense and shifts in tone, because those seem to be more difficult to fix and possibly signify a bigger underlying problem (especially tone). Comma issues drive me nuts, if only because I get serious wrist cramps and waste large quantities of ink trying to mark them all. I need to get in the habit of finding patterns in comma errors and then being satisfied with just marking a couple....but I can't help myself...I just...have to...put...commas...in!!! Aaaarghh!
But, again, the sentence-level errors just don't bug me in the same way that problems with organization, ideas, tone, etc. do--essays with more global issues take so much longer to grade because it is harder for me to identify, and then explain to the student, what the real issue is. This gets frustrating when I'm only halfway through a huge stack of papers and it's already 2 in the morning. Here's hoping I get better--and faster--at it. And in the meantime, I'm going to keep marking those commas.
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