What is meant by authentic ring, fluency and coherence? Elaboration and complex ideas and sentences? Fancy words? Impressive grammar and phrases? Serious mistakes and spelling errors? And 9 point mistakes?

The purpose of this article is to open up the meanings of the ‘unofficial criteria’ presented in the previous article. I think most of the ideas can be applied no matter which writing criteria you are using.

In other words, what kind of advice do you give to your students when they insist on getting useful advice to improve their writing?

The advice given must be based on the criteria used. If students get criteria-based feedback on their writing tasks, they will know which areas they are good at and which areas require much more work. But if we want our students to move to the next level this is not enough.

For instance, if the teacher gives the following points for the essay: overall impression 7,5, content/message 8/10, vocabulary and structures 6/10 and accurary/mistakes 7,5/10, the student will start wondering

• ‘How could I get 9/10 for content?’
• ‘What’s wrong with my opinions? I only got 7/10.’
• ‘What’s wrong with my structures and vocabulary? I think it is better than 6,5’
• ‘I have plenty of mistakes but you still gave me 8/10. Why?’

This article hopefully helps you to answer the students’ questions and justify your evaluations of the texts. I am using scale 1- 10 but whatever scale you use it does not affect the principles of evaluation and the advice given.

In the previous article we studied how to write an argumentative essay, and more precisely applied the ideas in the column ‘Content/Message’ and ‘Logical, convincing structure’. When I started my career I did not have good answers to the questions so don’t worry. Having marked a few hundred essays over the years you will be much wiser.

Let’s have a look at each column of the criteria and be more specific on what is required from the students. N.B: I would advise you to take a photo of the criteria and expand it on your phone screen or copy the criteria photo and print it to see it better.

The 1st column – holistic impression on flow of ideas and fluency – ease to read

• it is vital that a text is easy and pleasant to read
• the language is fluent and has an authentic ring means the text could have been written by a good native writer

• a typical feature of a coherent text is the use of connectors like ‘in addition’, ‘as a result’, ‘therefore’, ‘firstly’, ‘in brief’, ‘all in all’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, which indicate how the idea is supposed to be understood
• there are many ways to built a text logically, the most common ones being ‘problem – solution’, ’cause and effect’ and ‘cronological order of ideas’

The 2nd column – Message and content

• first of all, the writer has to understand what he/she is supposed to write about and respond fully to the topic and the task
• the conventions of the format have to be followed; a review of a film has to resemble a real one, etc.

• in an excellent piece of writing (9-10 points) we can enjoy lively narration or impressive arguments that are expanded/elaborated with convincing proof, reasons or examples ( = complex ideas)

The 3rd column – Vocabulary and grammatical structures

• a poor essay (max 6 out of 10 points) consists of main clauses with rather simple grammatical structures and satisfactory everyday vocabulary

• an excellent piece of writing (9-10 points) has a wide range of demanding structures in the active and passive voice, maybe shortened sentences and authentic phrases and idioms; very impressive vocabulary in placces.

N.B. In Finland senior high students write essays of 150 – 250 words and I advise them to have at least 10 fancy words and a couple of phrases and idioms plus varied sentence structures included in the essay. These words have to be underlined when they hand the essay in. This way the students learn to pay attention to their vocab and idioms. Of course, the style has to be consistent in the essay.

Points 3 -6 Vocabulary: to like, good, to get, rich; Grammar: I saw the accident. Did somebody die? I was afraid.

Points 7 – 8 Vocab: to fancy, excellent/wonderful, to receive, wealthy; Grammar: When I saw the accident, I started wondering if anyone had died in it.

Points 9 – 10: Vocab: to appeal, superb/exceptional/awesome, to obtain/to gain, affluent/well-to-do; Grammar: Having seen the fatal accident the first thing that crossed my mind were the consequences: were there any alarming casualties? An ambulance had been called …

I know – sometimes all this may seem artificial but this is the name of the game. The students are supposed to impress the reader with their ideas and language.

Use elaboration to make the students realize what they are supposed to do: For example: Change / elaborate the sentences below so that your points would be raised. ‘We went to the beach by bus. Dad took our car and went to work early. The weather was fine and many people came to the beach.’

4th column – The number and type of mistakes – accuracy

All mistakes are not equally bad – some are more serious than others! In the 1970s the grade could be minus 4 !?

Which mistakes are considered serious?

• basically any mistake that confuses the readers and makes them stop reading and wonder is a serious one

• spelling mistakes are serious if they cause misunderstandings or common words are misspelt (foreigners are often better in spelling than native speakers)
• wrong choice of words, especially if it causes misunderstandings, reduces the points given

What are 9, 6, 4 and 2 point mistakes?

When I went to school in the 1970s, we only translated texts and the teacher used coding 9, 6, 4 and 2-point mistakes. The full points were 100 and every time we made a mistake the points were reduced. As a result many of my classmates got results like minus 40 points. Meaning -4 out of 10. They knew quite a lot of English but were sent to the Antarctic with their skill. – Luckily those days are over!

Still. sometimes I write in the margins of the students’ essays if their mistake is minus 9, 6, 4 and 2 points just to make them pay more attention to the text when they are checking it = reading it silently in their heads. Some mistakes matter more than others!

I myself have a good idea what 9 and 2 point mistakes are like but 6 and 4 are more a matter of taste. My teacher never revealed the secret to us!