“Good style!”

Many instructors want to not only point out errors on students’ papers but also encourage them with positive comments about what they did well.  Unfortunately, it can take a lot of time writing out these comments with clear handwriting, and it involves mental energy trying to formulate what to say in a way that students can understand.

There is a method for indicating specifically what the student did well on any writing task, which takes little time on the part of the instructor and results in improved writing in the future.

Imagine that you are a student who just received his essay with this positive feedback from the instructor at the end of the essay:

“This was a good essay.  Your ideas were interesting.  You used advanced sentence styles.  And some of your examples helped me understand your main points.”

Will these comments actually help you, as a student, apply what you did to future writing tasks?  Which specific ideas were interesting?  Which specific sentences were the instructor referring to as advanced and which examples were helpful?

A time-consuming alternative that some instructors turn to is to write the comments in the margin next to specific place in the essay that they want to comment on.  The drawbacks with this are that it is time consuming, there is little space to write them, and the handwriting needs to be clear.  Also, one wonders whether students will actually read the comments.

Before describing an easy, efficient and effective method for giving focused positive feedback, it’s important to understand why we want to give positive feedback and what we want to give it for.  What we are trying to do is to encourage them to continue to use writing techniques which have made their writing assignments coherent, cohesive and interesting.

This means we’d like to point out where they have effectively used…

• subordinators (e.g., after, although, when, where, who, if, since) which can show relationship between ideas;
• conjunctions (e.g., and, but, so, or) which can show reasons and contrasts, and connect ideas;
• examples and good vocabulary, which can make their ideas more clear and interesting.
• good examples with enough details to clearly illustrate their ideas.

One easy, efficient and effective method for doing this is to use a colored pen or marker to underline or highlight specific words, sentences, examples and ideas.  For example, the instructor can tell the students that “green” means good.  As the instructors read the students’ papers, they merely underline those parts.  Or perhaps to emphasis especially good vocabulary words or expressions or a good use of a subordinator or conjunction, they could draw a green box around them.  And it takes very little mental energy on the instructor’s part to decide what to green and very little time to do it.

These green positive forms of feedback are noticed by students.  I once overheard a student comment on another student’s essay, “Wow!  Look at all that green!”

Another student who hadn’t produced a paper up to his usual standard asked me half-jokingly in a deadpan voice, “What happened?  Did you run out of green ink?”

It’s also easy to customize the “green” according to the needs of specific students.  For example, I once had a lower-level student who was struggling with her verb tenses on writing tasks.  On her paragraph assignment, I marked in green the verbs that had the correct verb tense.

Here is an example of “greens” on the second paragraph of a lower-level student’s paper about her roommate:  (Notice: the underlines would be in green color.)

Here is an example of “greens” on a paragraph in the body of a higher-level student’s paper in which he is explaining the Vietnamese word tú:

To read about a survey of students’ reactions to this “Green” technique, see Students’ Positive Responses to this Teacher Technique

To read about an effective technique for indicating grammar mistakes on students’ papers, which actually becomes a puzzle for students to solve, see How to lead ESL Students to Discover their Grammar Mistakes on Writing Assignments

David Kehe
Faculty Emeritus