Online Guide to Writing and Research

Chapter 7: Assessing Your Writing

Assessing your writing requires discipline, patience, and self-examination at every stage. In addition, you must understand the process of writing a paper to realize what it is you must evaluate. To assess your writing, you must evaluate both your writing process and your written product using a selected list of criteria. Assessment is not simply answering yes to a series of questions on a checklist. It’s also having reasonable and logical responses to the significant questions that show you understand how to write an assignment competently. Each time you write an essay assignment or a research paper, you become more skilled at understanding the writing process and how it works for you.

Each of you may have different uses for this chapter. For example, some of you may use it to check your final papers before turning them in. The checklists here offer you a means of discussing your writing with your teachers. Others of you may wish to develop a writing improvement plan. In any case, the checklists in this chapter are meant to supplement the other checklists found in this guide.

This chapter provides some guidance for evaluating your writing and checklists to help you isolate the significant elements at the different stages of writing. If you aren’t sure what these stages are or when they occur, review the relevant sections in this guide. This chapter also describes how you may grade your own writing.

The Research Stage

In this stage, you should emphasize the nature and scope of your research, ensuring that you have kept orderly and complete notes, performed an adequate survey of the research, and have your supporting ideas ready to develop into your first draft. In the research stage, you should be able to answer in detail the following questions:

The Draft Stage

When writing the first draft, you are trying to discover your thinking and to explore the ideas you have developed. In this stage, you should use your working thesis to plan your organization and develop your thoughts. In the draft stage, you should be able to answer the following questions with authority:

The Draft Stage

The First Draft

When the first draft is ready for review and feedback, you can use a checklist like the one presented here or develop one of your own. By identifying the stage in which errors most often occur, you can return to that stage for revision.

The Draft Stage

Using Feedback

When you solicit feedback, you need to evaluate it for its relevance to your assignment. Of course, you need to pay attention to your teacher’s feedback, but all feedback is not relevant to your revision.

The Draft Stage

The Revision Process and the Final Draft

After you have revised your first draft, the major issues of content, organization, and style should be clearly worked out. This stage of assessment is necessarily at a higher level or is more general because you should expect to have addressed the more detailed aspects during the other stages of writing. When you review your final paper one more time, you should answer successfully the questions in the following checklist.

How Is Writing Graded?

Students often want to know how their writing assignments are graded—that is, what is an A paper, a B paper, and so on. If you are in doubt, ask your teacher to explain his or her grading system. If your teacher gives you no feedback other than a grade, you should inquire about the strengths and weaknesses of your assignment. It’s always helpful to know the patterns of your strengths and weaknesses when you are trying to improve your writing.

The following grading criteria are considered standard for writing assignments. You can apply these criteria to your writing and use them along with any specific requirements your teacher issues for each assignment, to help you determine your grade for any individual assignment. This scoring guide may help you on this aspect of getting feedback. Remember that your teacher may give you a separate list of criteria or an additional list of requirements.

An A paper is characterized by outstanding informative writing marked by superior readability and competent handling of content. These traits are demonstrated in the following ways:

• The substance and organization follow a clear, logical sequence that makes the information easily accessible to the reader.
• The purpose is clearly expressed, and the selected details of the assignment reflect this purpose.
• The audience is accommodated throughout the assignment as reflected in effective communication and style.
• Words are chosen and sentences are constructed to make the information understandable.
• The grammar, mechanics, and format are flawless.

A B paper is characterized by distinguished writing that successfully fulfills the requirements but contains one of the following weaknesses:

• Although the writing is essentially well organized, the audience analysis, the statement of purpose, or the handling of the content is flawed.
• Although sentences are grammatically correct, their structure or length or both sometimes cause readers to work unnecessarily hard.
• Ambiguous or vague wording hinders precise communication.
• A small lapse in audience accommodation causes reader distraction.
• Grammar, mechanics, and format flaws interfere with reading and comprehension.

A C paper is characterized by satisfactory writing that is generally effective but contains any one of the following weaknesses:

• Although satisfactorily written, the body of the assignment is not clearly organized, or some material is not clearly explained; the audience and purpose are not clear.
• Sentences, although they are grammatically correct, often make information difficult to extract; editing key words or converting nouns to verbs could solve such problems.
• Wording interferes with readability, but the reader can still glean the meaning; rereading is often required.
• Repeated grammar, mechanics, or format errors mar the paper.

A D paper struggles to communicate information and contains weak writing. In a professional working environment, such writing would be considered incompetent because it suffers from any one of the following problems:

• Any two of the problems listed under a C paper.
• Minimal evidence of audience accommodation.
• Serious wording problems, such as garbled wording, gives the reader repeated and serious difficulties in understanding.
• Serious sentence problems, such as run-on sentences and comma splices, damage the readability.
• Grammar, spelling, or format problems create frequent obstacles to understanding.

A failing grade on a writing assignment usually means that your paper contains any two problems from the list for a D paper.

How Is Writing Graded?

A General Assessment Tool

Some teachers who are not writing teachers use a single-page evaluation tool to give their students feedback on their writing. We are including here an evaluation tool that you or your teacher can use for your writing assignments. One way to use this tool is to assign each criterion a value (C = competent, S = satisfactory, and I = needs improvement).

Using Assessment to Improve Your Writing

When you have successfully completed a writing assignment, you have begun to improve as a writer. When you choose to evaluate your writing, you have contracted with yourself to improve it. Even if you do not choose a career in professional writing, you will derive greater satisfaction from your academic and workplace writing if you continue to improve your writing skills.

By identifying your strengths and weaknesses and working on improving specific aspects of your writing using a list of criteria and a plan, you are using assessment to improve your writing. Every assignment is an opportunity for you to determine where you are in your writing progress and to set goals for the next step in your improvement plan.

Here’s how to continue improving your writing:

• Learn from your mistakes. Watch for patterns of strengths and weaknesses in your writing. Consciously and methodically work on improving your weaknesses. Regularly use your strengths to keep them strong.
  

• Analyze examples of good writing. By understanding how other writers have succeeded in writing effectively, you can improve your skills and strategies. Keep a notebook of writing samples that includes your notations about what works and what doesn’t.
  

• Build your skills as you go along. Work methodically on your writing, focusing on specific skills each time you write a paper. Keep a journal or course notebook so you can practice writing in a specific discipline. Don’t wait until the last minute to work on your writing assignments.
  

• Find opportunities for writing practice. Some courses require you to keep a journal or notebook with review and integrating questions, case study discussions, or laboratory notes. Use these opportunities to practice writing topic sentences, thesis statements, and major and minor supports. Practice writing effective sentences in a unified paragraph or practice freewriting. Use these shorter assignments as warm-ups for the longer research papers.
  

• Look for writing opportunities in all your classes. When you participate in a group assignment, volunteer to take minutes or write summaries of group decisions. Produce written proceedings of oral presentations. Ask your teacher for extra credit for writing extra papers.
  

• Take writing courses beyond your requirements. All writing courses, including creative writing, will help you improve your writing skills. Take a variety of writing courses to help you broaden your vocabulary, style, sentence structure, organization, and thinking.
  

• Take writing seminars offered by professional organizations. Many professional organizations offer short writing courses to help you learn new skills or new kinds of writing. Other organizations offer Internet-based courses to teach new writing skills, review grammar, and build vocabulary.
  

• Keep a journal or writing log. Keep tabs of your writing plan and your improvement. Set aside 10 or 15 minutes daily to review what you are focusing on and practicing; set aside another 10 or 15 minutes to practice it. Set goals to learn some new writing skill each week.
  

• Write, write, write. You won’t learn to write by reading a book on writing if you don’t practice what you have learned. Learning to write is like learning to play an instrument: you get better only by setting your goals and practicing your lessons. Your writing will improve through your consistent and concerted effort to improve it.
  

• Read, read, read. By reading good writing, you will be able to identify solid writing models and improve your sentence structure, spelling, punctuation, and vocabulary.

Conclusion

Using this guide can help you gain more confidence in your writing skills and apply them to your academic and workplace careers. By taking charge of your education, you are preparing yourself for a lifetime of communicating your knowledge, perhaps the single most important skill you can build. We hope this guide helps you reach that goal.