It’s that time of year again….my inbox is full of fourth year papers awaiting grading. This is not actually one…well, it is…from years ago that I just printed and randomly marked up without any actual intent beyond red ink on a paper that bears no name or other identifying attributes, it is for illustrative purposes only.
I had an experience today that made me stop and wonder if I’ve finally reached that point of “I’m too old for this shit”. When did red go from highlighting feedback for improvement to ‘trauma and anxiety inducing’.
I recall seeing a news headline some years back about the topic…in the UK, teachers are not to use red ink for grading papers because it is too ‘aggressive’.
Is an “F” in purple somehow better?
I don’t understand.
I read something today that younger people perceive red text/ink the same as all caps…yelling. That the use of red pens can have a negative impact on students’ self-esteem, attitude towards learning, and overall mental health.
When I was in university it was a running joke that when one of us received a paper back from our supervisor we’d ask how much blood had been spilled on it. A lack of red ink could be taken two ways:
1. It’s perfect, I’m a perfect writer … yay me!
2. The reader didn’t care enough to invest their time and effort into helping me improve something
I’m smart enough, and realistic enough, to know it’s not the first one.
When she first started working with me, one of my staff sent me something she’d written and I sent it back ‘dripping’ with red text. After sending it I walked over to her desk and said that I hoped it wasn’t too harsh and I should have checked in before editing the work and made sure she knew it wasn’t personal. She gave me a funny look, laughed at me, and said she’d had a conversation with her graduate supervisor once when he’d done much the same, and that she saw red ‘ink’ as a message of love from a supervisor in that it demonstrated that they care enough to try to help improve her writing. Also…she’d literally just finished her PhD so did I really think I could hurt her feelings around her writing? She’d had far worse.
All that made me smile and told me I could be honest in my feedback. Others have made similar comments, namely that the feedback is not unwelcome.
I’ve always been the same, or at least learned the same through all those years in academia….it’s unlikely anyone can hurt my feelings over my writing after doing a PhD. I know where my weaknesses lie, I know what my near constant errors are (hello “int he“), and I know that I have different writing voices and when and where to use them, and that they differ in style and preference to those of others.
I’ve had students that have written me after the courses are finished and actually thanked me for helping them become a better writer, for seeing the bias in their language, and for helping them better evaluate information and write to inform and educate.
But it doesn’t always work that way. Sometimes it gets taken personally, even though it never is.
Red ink is traumatizing?…..so many thoughts swirling through my head.
Are we going to reach a point where we literally can’t provide critical feedback because someone’s feelings will be hurt? What will the quality of the work end up at?
Each year I start to mark papers, I wonder if this will be the last….it’s getting closer.
Until then, here we go again 🙂
I have an inbox filled with papers to grade and feelings to hopefully not hurt…but if I do…then I guess I do. That’s part of the evaluation process.
And sometimes, I get it wrong….like in this image, I realized after the fact that my eyes inserted something that wasn’t there, and in my evening mockup-markup I marked something wrong on a fake paper that wasn’t wrong. This is also a great example of something I’d expect my student to call me out for and I’d need to acknowledge that I’d done something too quickly.