Show Your Spirit, Be Bold! (But Watch for Commas.)

This week has made me think a lot about how I grade student writing (obviously...?). I have been bouncing around in my brain on these ideas, and it's like the ping-pong effect:

• I should grade for voice! Forget conventions; that's just disheartening to them!
• Buuuuut wait, so am I just communicating that grammar is pointless? Write however you want as long as your message is good?

and

• Rubrics are the devil when it comes to giving writers feedback! They make us too reliant on form so that we are not focused at all on what the reader is really trying to say! 
• Buuuut wait, so should I scrap all the boxes of my rubrics and just make one that says "Writer got point across well." ??? What does this tell students about all the years of grammar they've encountered? Can we send them to the real world just blatantly disregarding sentence structure and basic conventions?! Eek, that frightens me!

Yup. Ping-ponging here. I know we've talked in our discussions about the idea of striking a balance; of learning to promote our positive notes while adding in constructive criticisms. For me, this rang true while I read Anson's piece with the many different styles of teacher feedback. I think that many if not all of those instances occur for me with each stack of papers I am grading. Maybe one for one paper, two or three for another, you get the idea...but the point is that we can have this idea of what the paper means, but how to we assess with equality then? How do we avoid subjectivity and give each student a fair shake? Or is that even possible? Is it right? 

I recently started grading my 87 personal statements. I picked up the first one. Oh, good! I worked with John* a lot on this. I can't wait to read his story!  (reading) Great intro! I like how unique it is. Sets me up for the rest of the story! (reading) Gah. Oh dear. 

 Let's just say it was one where I flipped through the pages thrice before burying it in the stack. Fragments everywhere...ideas just recklessly splatted into paragraphs...a random one-sentence paragraph about how he's a team player...oh dear. This saddened me because he had a great story to tell! I knew this because during our peer conference, he talked it out with me and he decided he really wanted to explain how sports had changed his life. "Awesome," I told him. "Show me, don't just tell me." I even gave him an example from a previous student who did something very similar. But something, so it seems, is lacking when it comes to making that mental story (which was very interesting, I might add) translate into sensible, meaningful sentences. He's a great student--steadfast, caring, sincere, and funny. So how the heck did this paper happen? 

That right there is why I can't just assess for the story. Because now I'm being head-over-heels subjective if I decide to grade solely upon that. We talked and he told it to me, so how can I possibly leave out that knowledge when I'm assessing for a score? And can I send him off to college with him thinking it's ok to produce fragmented sentences and thoughts as long as you tell the prof your story first? (Apologies for cynicism there...but you get my point) No, this just won't do. I have to teach him (and all of them), but really, really teach them that voice is important, but if you can't make your story clear, sensible, transitional, narrative, descriptive, and well-worded, then the voice can't be heard. It's like when you watch two versions of a movie: the old one and the remake. Same basic tale, but somehow one is always better than the other. The old version of The Great Gatsby loses something for me; I didn't ever see the spark between Daisy and Jay like I do in the Leonardio DiCaprio version. As in, holy hell, that "thing" between them is beyond words and moves me to tears in many scenes. That's the difference. HOW we get there...HOW we portray the story is half, if not more than half, the battle. JK Rowling could have written a 100-page book about an unfortunate kid who realized his courage and became a hero; she could have written about all seven years at Hogwarts in those 100 pages; she could have said things like, "Harry killed Voldemort." But instead (and luckily for us), wrote this:

                   Harry Potter: "I know things you don't know, Tom Riddle. I know lots of important                              things that you don't. Want to hear some, before you make another big mistake?
                   Voldemort: "Is it love again? Dumbledore's favorite solution; love, which he claimed                          conquered death [...]? So what will stop you dying now when I strike? [...] If it is not                          love that will save you this time, you must believe that you have magic that I do not, or                        else a weapon more powerful than mine?"
                   Harry Potter: "I believe both."            

                         (Harry and Voldemort face off in the Great Hall in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows)

And without Rowling's (and all the other authors out there in the universe) keen attention to structure and word choice and her editors' focus on correct conventions and usage, I probably wouldn't be sitting here right now, typing this in my "School of Witchcraft and Wizardry" shirt I purchased at Universal Studios' Harry Potter World Gift Shop, now would I? 

Alas, I feel a little cheated and cheap coming off of this week, after all of the insightful, though-provoking chock-full resources we encountered and scoured, as I concluded thereof that I just feel like we need students to realize that it's a battle of balance. You can't have the amazing voice...that spark...that "something" without also formulating sentences of grammatical awareness. But that's not everything. At all. Good news: grammar can be fixed! So tell your stories, students! Fear not the grammar queen--go forth in your tales! Show me your spirit! Be bold, be unafraid! But...and there has to be a "but," at what point is voice lost because of missing conventional accuracy?