My students submit their papers to me electronically, and recently I've started taking greater liberties with those documents. In addition to writing marginal comments using Word's commenting features, and writing notes at the end, I've begun making direct alterations to their papers.

(This is a lengthy post - click "read more" for the rest.)

Not in the sense of replacing their words with my own; certainly not. No, I've been altering the format of their documents to extend my comments. For example, one student turned in a five-page paper in which he used the word "this" thirty-six times. The word turned large portions of his paper into an indecipherable mass of unspecified referents. Naturally, I commented on the problem. But I also used Word's "Find All" function to select every occurrence of the word "this" and make them all red. The technique worked; when he came in for a paper conference, he told me that he hadn't realized he'd been using the word so very often.

In another case, I made a copy of a paragraph and reformatted it. The student began every single paragraph in his entire paper with a paraphrase of the article under analysis, and only got to his own points at the end of the paragraph. He had points to make, but they were buried. To highlight this problem, I copied the first five words of every paragraph and listed them in order at the end of the document, then took one representative paragraph and rearranged the sentences without altering the content. The rearranged version was not directly usable (since the words connecting the sentences no longer made sense), but demonstrated the structural differences fairly well. The student got the point, and made his revision significantly better just by putting his own points at the beginning. I was pleased that he didn't change every paragraph mechanically - one he left with the paraphrase at the beginning, but he did introduce his own point more quickly afterwards.

If we ditch paper, there are all kinds of ways we can expand on our commenting. We can make as many copies of student papers as we need, and we can alter them in all kinds of ways to demonstrate our points directly. Some students will likely interpret this technique as a direct command to change things in particular ways. But many of our students interpreted plain marginal comments as direct commands anyway. Though we should be careful to specify that the changes are for demonstration purposes only, some of them will doubtless continue interpreting our comments as "corrections" rather than "comments."

Lately I've been thinking about expanding my manipulation of electronic paper copies to see if I can break down that faulty "corrections" model. Specifically, I'm going to try showing my students the exact differences between two versions One benefit of having students submit electronic copies of their papers is that it's extremely easy to compare versions of electronic documents. In fact, that's one of the first things I do when grading a revised version of a paper: I load up a copy of the first version, then use Word's "Compare and merge documents" feature to generate a new document showing exactly what changed in between the two versions. I find the comparison illuminating, and it makes it extremely easy to identify papers in which the sole changes consist of replacing words with longer synonyms.

Last term, towards the end, a student who had produced a revision featuring only minor lexical changes wished to talk about his paper. I had given him the same grade on the revision as on the first version. In the course of discussion, I loaded up his paper and showed him exactly what he had changed. He got this rather shocked look on his face and said "Oh. It felt like a lot more than that."

I'd like to replicate that moment of realization. The problem is, I don't quite know what the student realized; he had to go immediately after that point in the conversation. "It felt like more than that," he said. Did he suddenly realize that his revisions were focussed on minor phrasing matters? That significant revision happens on the level of ideas? Or ... did he conclude that I was grading by counting the number of alterations?

I'm about to hand back the second version of paper 1 to my current batch of students. I'm going to generate a document comparison for each paper and email it to the writer; I'm going to show them their footprints. I just hope it doesn't backfire on me.