• Encourage revision:
  • Students need to understand that the first draft is not the final product.
  • Require one or two drafts before the final paper
    • Return the first draft with broad comments
    • Return the second draft with an initial grade

• Begin with a simple thesis statement:
  • During a class discussion, give students a place to begin
    • "Eating chocolate is bad for you."
    • Ask students for confirming evidence and complementing evidence
    • Rewrite the statement

• Develop effective writing prompts:
  • The shorter and more direct the better
    • Who is the audience
    • What is the major purpose of the paper
    • Identify the genre – a traditional paper, business letter, position paper, etc.

• Build interest
  • Give students options - two or three that essentially accomplish the same goal
    • For example, have them choose a news article giving them a few different dates
    • Select a preexisting text and have the students create their own variation or adaption of the text

• Minimize panic
  • Students may panic if they have no knowledge of the subject
    • Tell them to use the material in the textbook
    • You may think there is a natural connection between the current reading assignment and the writing assignment but some students may not know
    • Given them copies of articles in class and have them choose one to be used in their writing assignment – limit the article(s) so that it is manageable
    • Give students the criteria that will be used for grading their assignments – perhaps a rubric

Rubric for Researched Arguments

Defining the Evaluative Criteria

When evaluating your essays, I will assess the degree to which each essay demonstrates competency in each of the following areas by assigning the word score of excels, exceeds competency, meets competency, or does not meet competency for each criteria. For the purposes of our course, I have provided an explanation of the scores and the criteria below.

Does not meet competency—the essay does not complete a majority of the items listed under a particular criterion OR the essay does not complete the most important items (determined by the instructor) listed under a particular criterion.

Meets competency—the essay completes the most important items listed under a particular criterion.

Exceeds competency—the essay completes all items listed under a particular criterion.

Excels—the essay completes all of the items listed under a particular criterion and completes the majority of those items very well.

Content:

• The thesis is clear, complex, and makes a claim.
• The essay’s central issue is well-analyzed and well-researched.
• The claims and evidence of outside sources are presented clearly and analyzed effectively.
• The essay’s claims are justifiable given the relevant evidence.
• The essay balances outside sources with its own ideas.
• The essay provides insight into the issue it investigates.

Rhetorical Awareness:

• The essay follows the directions of the assignment.
• The essay is written with the appropriate audience in mind.
• The essay is an argument with a specific purpose. (The purpose may not always be to persuade.)
• If the argument intends to persuade, it makes effective use of one or more rhetorical appeals.
• The essay considers counterevidence and counterarguments in a fair manner.

Structure:

• The essay presents ideas in an organized and effective way.
• When appropriate, the essay makes effective use of the traditional structures of argument, e.g., Classical, Rogerian, Toulmin.
• The essay uses transitional sentences, subheadings, sign-posting, and/or other organizational elements.
• The essay’s introductions and conclusions are appropriate to the type of argument being made.

Style:

• The essay’s diction and tone are appropriate for its intended audience.
• The essay balances sentence structures and lengths.
• The essay introduces and comments on quotations.
• The essay uses quotations to extend argument, create dialogue between opposing voices, and provide evidence.
• All sources are documented with the style chosen by the instructor.

Mechanics:

• The essay is free of errors in punctuation, spelling, grammar, usage, and other conventions of academic writing.

Revision:

• Rough drafts show important changes to the essay’s ideas, rhetorical awareness, structure, style, and mechanics.

Evaluative Scoring Rubric for Researched Arguments

The Rubric

The Rubric

These are the six writing criteria that I will use to grade and evaluate student papers and portfolios. I have provided a thorough explanation of what is meant by excellent, strong, fair, and weak for each criterion.

Idea Development

Idea Development measures how well one balances claims and evidence, the complexity of a central controlling idea (or thesis), and the extent to which one has thoroughly dealt with (analyzed) the subject at hand.

Weak: Essays that are weak in idea development do not develop their central claims to any meaningful degree. This usually manifests itself in length, i.e., the essay is way too short to show a development or analysis of ideas, and if there is a thesis, it has gone unexplored.

Fair: Essays that are fair in idea development begin to develop ideas but provide little specific evidence and elaborate upon and analyze their topics minimally. These essays stay at the descriptive, “what” level and are not getting to the “why” and “how” levels of development. These essays suffer from weak theses, and these essays also take no intellectual risks, meaning they often discuss the obvious or what is easy to discuss rather than analyzing and questioning the ideas they are concerned with.

Strong: Essays that are strong in idea development explore ideas thoroughly, provide interesting and relevant supportive evidence for all claims, elaborate upon complex ideas, and analyze their topic sufficiently. They get at the whys and hows of things. The thesis is clear, interesting, and relatively complex, but may still be conventional.

Excellent: Essays that develop ideas to an excellent degree not only develop and analyze complex ideas thoroughly, provide interesting supporting evidence, and fully elaborate on claims, they also surprise the reader with their creative approaches to these ideas. They take intellectual risks. They do not just discuss the whys and hows of their topics; they chiefly concern themselves with the whys and hows of their topics, digging deeply into the complexity of the ideas they present and often questioning their premises. In other words, a serious, in-depth analysis of the topic is what the essay is about, and it does so in a fresh, illuminating way with a thesis that is complex but explained with ease. 

Sense of Purpose

A sense of purpose measures the “so what?” of a paper. It encompasses the extent to which the author has written the paper with an audience in mind and the extent to which the author has conveyed the significance or reason that the paper needed to be written to that audience.

Weak: Essays with a weak sense of purpose generally misunderstand what the assignment is asking for. They also fail to take into consideration whether the audience has access to the same information the author has access to, and they use language inappropriate for their audience. Finally, these essays do not answer the “So what?” question, provide significance, provide a stance, or seem to know what the paper is supposed to do for readers.

Fair: Essays with a fair sense of purpose display some consideration for what their readers need to know but not much. They begin to answer the “So what?” question, but not thoroughly or complexly, and may have an unclear stance or two or more conflicting stances. These essays will use language that is appropriate to the assignment and demonstrate that they know generally what the assignment is asking of them. However, these papers haven’t quite figured out what the paper is supposed to do for readers. They will also answer the “So what?” question with unexplored answers.

Strong: These essays set up intellectual expectations for their readers and use the rest of the essay to address those expectations. The writer’s stance is clearly revealed to readers, and the essay is focused on the significances of its observations for its readers. All language is appropriate to the readers imagined by the writer, and the assignment is obviously well-understood. The point of the assignment has been incorporated into the paper, and a sense of what the paper will do to readers is present.

Excellent: These essays do all of the things strong essays do and more. Essays that have an excellent sense of purpose separate themselves from strong ones in the degree to which the reader’s expectations are fulfilled. For example, these essays often refer back to their central claim in order to clarify its significance. These central claims tend to be rather complex, and the writer understands that readers will need to be reminded of how each new idea presented relates to this central claim. These essays demonstrate that the paper is meant to be read by someone and that the writer has thought about the effects of language on the reader. And it is eminently clear that the nature of the assignment has been considered. There is no question about what this paper wants to do to its readers. The “So what?” question has been answered in a fresh way.

Organization

Organization deals with the logical order of ideas as demonstrated by global organization (introductions, conclusions, and body paragraphs) as well as local organization (the order of sentences within those paragraphs). Smooth and logical transitions between ideas and paragraphs are also organizational issues.

Weak: These essays simply are disorganized. The introduction does not introduce the topic at hand, the conclusion does not wrap up what has been discussed, and there are no transitions between paragraphs. Primarily, though, these essays have trouble sticking to the topic or haven’t quite figured out what order their ideas should come in.

Fair: In these essays, there is an introduction that attempts to introduce a topic as well as a conclusion that tries to wrap up the discussion. They just do so in methodical, mundane ways. The five paragraph essay will almost always receive a fair score for organization because it is so formulaic. Therefore, essays that are organized to a fair degree may suffer from a kind of generic quality to organizing, e.g., introductions that start with three things to discuss or conclusions that restate the introduction or summarize the essay as a whole. These essays may have some problems with organizing ideas within paragraphs, but the larger organization will be mostly clear. They may also have the problem of a long tangent that is never connected to the original idea, or the essay will be split into to halves that deal with issues that go unconnected.

Strong: Essays that are organized well have clear, interesting introductions that prepare readers for what will come in the rest of the essay. The thesis may or may not be located in the introductory paragraph but is usually found somewhere on the first page. The ideas of one paragraph, while connected to each other, also spill over into the next paragraph, creating smooth transitions that tie ideas together. There may be some tangents, but these tangents are generally shown to be relevant. Conclusions do not restate the introduction, but rather, wrap up the discussion by coming to some kind of resolution or sense of closure about the topic. Finally, there is a logical flow of ideas throughout the essay, and the essay feels like a coherent whole.

Excellent: Perhaps, the best way to describe an excellently organized essay is to say that its form and content are balanced. Moving a paragraph or even a sentence will hurt the organization of this essay, where moving a paragraph or sentence in an essay that is organized strongly might improve it. Once again, the difference between the strong and excellent scores here is a matter of degree. An essay that has excellent organization will do everything a strong essay does, but it will do it better. Often this shows itself in the drafting process when one introduction in a rough draft is abandoned or revised significantly in favor of a new one that accomplishes its goals more effectively (although revising your introduction will not always give you excellent organization overall). There is often a certain ease of readability about these essays, or they may even be unconventional in their organization, though this unconventionality is purposeful and helps the essay cohere better.

Style

Style encompasses many things, including voice, a balance of long and short sentences, a variety of sentence beginnings, word choice, how one uses quotations, and general ways of phrasing.

Weak: Essays with a weak style score will lack many different but related things. First, they will lack sentence variety, meaning that most sentences will be of the same structure or same length, which causes a monotonous rhythm. Second, the level of diction (or word choice) will be extremely vague. For example, this writing might use the words “thing” and “stuff” a lot as well as the vague pronouns “it” and “this.” Mostly, there is a general lack of specificity. Any quotations used will simply be plunked down into the essay without comment. Finally, there may be a weak voice or one that seems to lack commitment to its topic, or the tone of voice may be inappropriate for the kind of essay being written, e.g. too formal or informal.

Fair: There is some variety of sentence structure and length but not much. The essay pays more attention to its choice of words but is still too vague in places. There is a voice, but it is uninvolved in its topic, often sounding forced into a kind of generic “essay-speak.” This essay might also rely heavily on clichés, and will have varying success with incorporating quotations into its discussion.

Strong: The essay with a strong style score will be characterized by a strong, involved voice. The diction will be specific and at times lively. Quotations, when used, will be introduced and elaborated upon, and sentence structure and length will vary. The writing will reveal that the writer has thought about the effects of language on his or her audience. Finally, the essay is a pleasure to read.

Excellent: Stylistically excellent essays stand out as those essays that engage the reader from the first sentence to the last. They accomplish this task with a lively choice of specific words and phrases, by the deft variation of sentence structures and lengths, clarifying introductions to and elaborations upon quotations, an impressive vocabulary, and with a voice that seems effortless and entirely in control of what it says. In fact, control, is the key word for stylistically excellent essays. The writer is in total control of how she says what she says, consistently walking that line between expressing her own ideas the way she wants and shaping them for her audience.

Grammar & Conventions

Grammar & Conventions deals with the standard rules for written English and the documentation style developed by the Modern Language Association.

Weak: Essays with weak scores in this category have enough grammatical or usage errors to distract educated readers from the ideas expressed in the essay. They are usually characterized by several different kinds of errors made throughout the essay rather than just on one page, e.g. serious problems with subject verb agreement, multiple and varying misspellings, lots of fused sentences, comma splices, etc. Here we are really talking about the number of errors being so overwhelming that it gets in the way of easy reading. Essays that make no attempt to use MLA Style for the documentation of sources will also be scored weak in this area.

Fair: These essays have fewer errors than those with weak scores, obviously, but still enough to be bothersome to educated readers. There may even be the same kinds of errors as mentioned above; they will just be made less frequently. In contrast with those with weak scores, these essays may occasionally show knowledge of a rule in one instance, but not the next. Finally, there may be an attempt to document sources, but either MLA Style has been used incorrectly or some other documentation style has been used.

Strong: These essays have few errors. There may be a couple of comma errors or careless typing or spelling errors, but in general, the writing is free of grammatical and usage errors. MLA Style is used to document sources and has very few errors.

Excellent: These essays are nearly flawless in all grammatical and usage issues, including the use of MLA Style for documentation of sources.

Revision

Revision literally means “to see again.” There are a couple of kinds of revision, editing and idea-oriented revision. Editing mostly applies to stylistic and grammatical issues. Idea-oriented revision deals with the thesis of the paper, the sense of purpose, and organization. Success in revision depends on the number of drafts, the type of revision performed, and the quality and appropriateness of those changes.

Weak: The essay shows little or no attempt at revision that would significantly improve the essay, or the essay has no rough drafts.

Fair: The essay has been edited only where marks were made on the previous draft. It also shows minor rephrasing for clarity. New ideas may be added, but they will be minor, raise new problems, or do not adequately address the issue they were intended to address. Some irrelevant information may be removed.

Strong: The essay has been edited where comments were made and where the author has found errors on his own. It also shows evidence of significant revision to the areas of Idea Development, Organization, and Sense of Purpose. Revision of this kind makes extensive elaboration on previously unclear claims, adds several paragraphs of new text, incorporates new evidence and secondary sources where relevant, rearranges paragraphs to clear up organizational problems, and strengthens introductions and conclusions with significant rewriting.

Excellent: As with the other categories, excellence in revision does every described in Strong and goes beyond it. Most significantly this writing shows evidence that the major premise of the writing has been seen anew. Often evidence for this kind of re-seeing is found in a major revision of the thesis statement or controlling idea, wherein the new controlling idea is simultaneously more complex and clearer. This revision reflects a more thorough understanding on the part of the writer of the issue at hand, especially in the paper’s purpose. Elaboration and deletion are balanced. Any new information is absolutely necessary to the deeper understanding of the problem or issue explored in the writing. Introductions and conclusions are significantly different (if not entirely) from earlier drafts. Often the tone of voice in the essay has shifted in some meaningful way.

Essay Evaluation Sheet

Essay Evaluation Sheet

Author ____________________________