Thirty Essays, Four Hours, and the Same Errors Again

Classification and judgement:

#	Item	Category	Verdict
1	"The reason why … is because"	Redundancy / usage preference	Low priority. The meaning is perfectly clear; formal edited English prefers "The reason he failed is that…" but many educated writers use "is because." Treat as style/register, not as a grammatical error. Marking it red alongside real errors over-signals it.
2	"Me and my friends"	Pronoun case in subject position	Worth marking. Rule-governed: subject pronouns are required → "My friends and I." Order convention (others first) is courtesy, not grammar - do not conflate the two.
3	"She don't"	Subject–verb agreement (third person singular)	Worth marking - high priority. One of the most frequent and most socially noticed errors in formal writing; it is also a rule the class has been taught, so it is fair game for correction.
4	"I have went there yesterday"	Two problems: past participle form (→ gone), and present perfect clashing with the definite past time marker "yesterday" (→ simple past "I went")	High priority, and the most instructionally rich. This is not a slip; it reflects an incomplete tense system. It deserves a mini-lesson, not a red circle.
5	"He is more taller"	Double comparative	Worth marking. Clear, rule-based, easily self-corrected.
6	"Their going … with there friends"	Homophone confusion (their/there/they're)	Highest priority for proofreading. It actually affects the reader's processing, appears frequently, and is fixable with a self-editing routine rather than more grammar explanation.

Priority principle. Rank by three tests: (a) does it impede or distract the reader, (b) is it frequent and socially salient in formal writing, (c) is it a rule the class has been taught and can act on. Items 3, 4, 5, and 6 pass; item 2 passes on (b) and (c); item 1 fails all three, so it belongs in a general style remark at most - not in red ink on every paper.

Core principle: selective, focused, and processed feedback beats exhaustive marking. Red ink on everything was processed by students as decoration; it produced no change because nothing was selected, prioritized, or acted on.

The plan:

Before marking (10 minutes). Choose three target error types for this cycle - for example subject–verb agreement, homophones (their/there/they're), and the double comparative. Tell students the targets in advance; give them the three-item checklist to self-check before submitting next time. Announcing targets converts marking into assessment for learning.

During marking (about 6–7 minutes per essay).

• Read the whole essay first for meaning against the rubric - content and organization are the point of a persuasive essay, and an error-dense paper can still be a good argument. Score the rubric first, so the grammar judgment does not contaminate it.
• Mark the three target errors directly (symbol + brief correction in the margin).
• Mark other errors indirectly - a code in the margin (e.g., "T" for tense, "WO" for word order) with no correction, so the learner must locate and fix it.
• Do not correct the same error twice in one paper. The second instance gets a tally mark on a running class list.

Use the tallies (20 minutes total). The class error tally tells you what to teach on Wednesday: if 19 of 30 papers show the "have went" pattern, that is a whole-class mini-lesson, not 30 individual corrections.

After returning: require action (10 minutes of class time). A short revision task - rewrite the two sentences containing the coded errors, or revise one paragraph using the checklist. Feedback that is never used is not feedback. Add a 24-hour deadline for the revision so the essay is still fresh.

Why this is defensible within four hours: it reduces per-paper marking time by limiting direct correction to three categories, it makes the remaining marks into puzzles the student must solve (deeper processing than copying a correction), and it routes the most common problems to whole-class instruction, which is the only instruction that scales to 30 learners.

The response: mark it, correct it, and frame it as a matter of situation, not of being wrong.

• Do not write "wrong" or "careless" in the margin. Write the standard form alongside: "My friends and I went…," with a one-line note that the subject form of the pronoun is needed here - "My friends and I" not "Me and my friends." The comparison "I went; me went?" makes the rule visible in one second.
• Do not correct the order as an error. "My friends and I" reflects a courtesy convention (put yourself last); "I and my friends" is grammatically fine. Conflating a politeness norm with a grammar rule teaches learners that their language instincts are shameful rather than that English has different registers.
• Name the register explicitly. In many Philippine communities, "Me and my friends went…" is unremarkable in casual speech and in some local varieties of English. In a formal essay, examination, or job application, edited Standard English is the expected variety. The learner is not being asked to abandon one variety for another; they are being asked to add a variety they can switch into. That framing protects identity and is also simply accurate.
• Use contrastive analysis, not correction-by-repetition. Put the two forms side by side and ask which fits the audience. This is more durable than crossing out the "wrong" one, because the learner now holds both forms and a rule for choosing.

Why this matters beyond this essay. A learner who is told their home language is a defect writes less, and writing volume is the main driver of writing improvement. The goal is a learner who can produce formal edited English on demand and is not alienated from the language they think in. Marking only sets the target; the learner's willingness to keep writing determines whether they ever reach it.