Grading Essays in English 101

The following set of criteria was established according to Rio Salado English 101 assessment guidelines. These are built upon eight categories: content, audience and purpose, focus and organization, balance of abstract and concrete elements, style, grammar, punctuation, mechanics, and diction.

An A essay: an excellent essay in English 101 is characterized by the following features:

  1. Insights and ideas that are striking, significant, and illuminating;
  2. Vividly sharp focus, masterful command of purpose, and agile strategies to accomplish that purpose with the audience;
  3. A compellingly patterned, seamlessly coherent structure;
  4. Abstractions that are substantiated with aptly chosen and deftly integrated concrete details;
  5. Advanced stylistic skills, evidenced in the use of parallel phrases and clauses, periodic structures, cumulative sentences, and other grammatically complex forms used effectively for rhetorical goals;
  6. Virtually error-free prose;
  7. Punctuation that is used rhetorically, for effect as well as clarity; and
  8. Diction that is precise, inventive, and felicitous.

A B essay: an essay that is above average, shows these features:

  1. Content that is interesting and shows some originality in conception and development;
  2. A clear and consistent focus and careful attention to the relationship between a writer's purpose and methods of accomplishing that purpose with the audience;
  3. A purposefully organized and coherent pattern of ideas;
  4. Abstractions that are consistently and adequately balanced with supporting and clarifying details;
  5. Prose that is lively, varied, and dependent upon sentences that use complex grammatical structures to convey relatively fine shades of meaning and rhetorical sensitivity;
  6. Prose that is virtually free of serious grammatical errors (such as those listed in point five of the description of a C paper);
  7. Punctuation that is used purposefully in sentences that are relatively free of spelling and other mechanical errors; and
  8. Diction that is appropriate for the essay's rhetorical situation and is occasionally felicitous.

A C essay: an essay that meets minimum requirements of competent, adequate writing for English 101 shows the following features:

  1. Interesting or sensible, if somewhat self-evident, content;
  2. A discernible central idea or thesis and an adequate sense of both purpose and audience;
  3. A structure that is generally unified around a central idea or thesis, is organized, and is without serious transitional gaps;
  4. Abstractions that are usually balanced by supporting and clarifying detail;
  5. Generally clear prose that is not excessively wordy or burdened with cliches and that uses a variety of sentence structures (this variety should be sufficient to indicate that the writer is aware of basic options for arranging grammatical structures-e.g., the use of simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex sentences);
  6. Sentences that are relatively free of errors in such grammatical basics as subject-verb agreement, pronoun-antecedent agreement, verb forms and tenses, modification, and case;
  7. Punctuation, spelling, and other mechanical errors that only occasionally detract either from the clarity of sentences or the image of a competent, educated writer; and
  8. Diction that is, in general, rhetorically appropriate and accurate.

A D or F essay shows one or more of the following features:

  1. Content that ranges from the barren to the superficial;
  2. Focus that is blurred by a failure to establish a central idea or thesis and that has little recognizable sense of purpose or audience;
  3. Structure that wanders aimlessly or has an appearance of form without the development that makes parts a whole, that suffers from transitional chasms;
  4. Abstractions that are strung together without sufficient or appropriate detail to clarify and defend the assertions;
  5. Style that is weakened by convoluted sentences or by monotonously safe reliance on simple sentences;
  6. Flaws in or confusions about elementary grammatical patterns;
  7. Repeated failure to make correct distinctions among such marks of punctuation as periods, commas, and semicolons; or numerous mechanical errors;
  8. A failure to use language precisely.