Reading to Write / Writing to Read (Thoughts on teaching Shakespeare)

First Thoughts (Expositio)

    Last night I explained a composition idea for a Shakespeare class to a professor of Renaissance literature. “RCL [rhetoric, composition, and literacy] instructors love this idea,” I noted, “but Renaissance professors are skeptical.”
    “That's because Introduction to Shakespeare is a Renaissance course, not a composition course,” she responded.
    Is it? I didn't have a response to the professor at the time, but since then I've followed the research available to me to write a curriculum that may provide the best of both worlds. I came to this approach―gradually but graciously―after a lot of study of the sources in John C. Bean's Engaging Ideas. That book only arrived on my desk thanks to OSU's Writing Across the Curriculum reading group―a group that finally opened my eyes to the utility of writing to promote critical thinking and lifelong learning.
    Is Introduction to Shakespeare a Renaissance and not a composition course? I must slavishly quote from Bean's premise, that “writing is closely linked to thinking, and”
in presenting students with significant problems to write about―and in creating an environment that demands their best writing―we can promote their general cognitive and intellectual growth. When we make students struggle with their writing, we are making them struggle with the thought itself. Emphasizing writing and critical thinking, therefore, generally increases the academic rigor of the course. Often the struggle of writing, linked as it is to the struggle of thinking and to the growth of a person's intellectual powers, awakens students to the real nature of learning. [emphasis added] (Bean xvi)
In Introduction to Shakespeare, I want transform students' struggles with vocabulary and syntax; context and history; form and style; into real growth in critical thinking and meaning-making. And the most transformative meaning-making strategies all share one thing: writing.

Background (Narratio)

    What's worse, Shakespeare instructors have to pack so much of this into a term to prepare their students to write original research. This is a noble goal, and in principle, I like to give students genuine and significant problems. In order for the students to write original research, the typical instructor will guide them at breakneck speed past the well-trafficked paths and dead ends. The typical instructor delegates the task of secondary research to her students in the form of an annotated bibliography. This inadvertently cruel assignment asks students with a few weeks'  experience to enter into a critical conversation, evaluate expert critical positions, and then―probably on the final paper―write a complex but unified thesis that yields an integrated framework that can respond to the entire array of facts and values in the critical universe.
    After this breakneck rush to original research, what do students write? They write a pile of papers that intimidates everyone. Instructors feel they must evaluate extensively―correcting grammar, proofreading works cited, suggesting sources and counter-arguments―because there are so few opportunities to correct student writing, to shape them into young researchers. The students feel the instructor's frenzy, and struggle to cope with a page full of red ink or electronic mark-up. Students skip to find the essay's grade, because this ineffable assignment will only give way to another, more ineffable assignment with raised expectations and even more red text. When the students finally deliver their ultimate paper, the instructor marks everything in a mania: a solid week of extensive reading that produces a stack of unread responses, a monument to frustration. The students don't come back to receive their papers; the pile grows; the instructors despair.
    And yet, I propose to add even more writing to Introduction to Shakespeare. I can imagine my colleagues saying, “The students are terrible writers, grading kills me, and they never respond to feedback, anyway. Why should I assign more writing?” You should assign more of the right kind of writing to
·    promote critical thinking,
·    introduce students to disciplinary conventions, and
·    enforce progressive improvement throughout the semester.
This is hardly motivating to the skeptic, so I should outline exactly why such a plan would work.

My goals (Partitio)

    My proposed methods begin with my goals for the class, and working backwards from there, arrive at a different sequence of assignments for the Shakespearean classroom. My central conceit comes from the research of the combined National Survey of Student Engagement and Council of Writing Program Administrators. John C. Bean summarizes their findings as, “good assignments... give students opportunities to [1] receive early feedback on their work, [2] encourage meaning-making, and [3] clearly explain the instructor's expectations and purpose”  [numbers interpolated](1).
    In what follows, I'll outline what those qualities mean, and what they mean in relation to to Introduction to Shakespeare. Then I'll suggest some of the most pivotal assignments for Introduction to Shakespeare. I should return, then, to the common complaints I've heard about teaching Shakespeare, and respond to them before concluding.

Where to begin (Confirmatio)

Interactive components

    Interactive components, those that grant early and frequent feedback, “situate writing as a process of inquiry and discovery, promote productive talk about the writer's emerging ideas, and encourage multiple drafts and global revision” (Bean 97). In the Shakespearean classroom, this characteristic of good assignments forbids “the pile” of ungraded assignments: This is, of course, earlier said than done. The most effective strategies appear to be
a.    Task-specific rubrics to signal goals to students
b.    Generate ideas in groups or in class
c.    Identify struggling students with early assignments
d.    Require peer reviews on first drafts
e.    Use one-on-one conferences to respond to high-order concerns
f.    Comment on late drafts rather than final products
g.    Use models to comment on style, grammar, etc.
h.    Make revision-oriented comments based on high-order concerns
i.    Use a rubric on final products    (Bean 290-16)

Meaning-making assignments

    Meaning-making assignments place the student within a rhetorical context with (a) a  role and (b) an audience, and between those, (c) a generic or disciplinary format relevant to (d) an intriguing problem (Bean 97). In the Shakespearean classroom, a meaning-making assignment consists of
a.    The role of persuading a reader of some interpretation of the text
b.    An experienced and skeptical audience (who fail to immediately distinguish the student's claim from existing scholarship)
c.    A guided introduction to the chief debates in Shakespearean scholarship
d.    An intriguing problem generated from a series of imaginative doodles, reflections, and open questions

A clear explanation of the instructor's goals

    A clear explanation of the instructor's goals typically resembles a rubric, insofar as it presents the instructor's grading criteria in relation to the course goals (Bean 97). While rubrics seem anathema to the Shakespearean classroom, I find that they are actually a profound distillation of instructors' unspoken presumptions. While the implied precision of the rubric can discomfort instructors, I believe that instructor discomfort can indicate either a general numerophobia or the instructor's own inaccuracy in the design of the rubric. None of these implicate the rubric itself, as a method of assessment. A rubric should never be claimed to represent objectivity, but only consistency in the application of grading criteria. In the Shakespearean classroom, a rubric ought to show students the quality and preponderance of each criterion so that
a.    the instructor has a facile tool for responding to student papers
b.    the instructor has a clear explanation of priorities in the event of a disputed grade
c.    the students write to their audience
d.    the students can appreciate the consistency by which the instructor applies admittedly subjective judgments

Working Backwards

The extra twist in applying these three criteria is that Shakespeare wrote what we now call “difficult texts.” According to Bean's Engaging Ideas, students struggle with difficult texts due to

• poor reading processes,
• failure to reconstruct the text as they read,
• failure to assimilate the unfamiliar,
• limited understanding of the rhetorical context,
• failure to interact with the text, and
• unfamiliarity with cultural codes.

Students might expect to read Shakespeare superficially, at most to retain plot information. The cause and effect of superficial reading is that students don't commit enough time to read. When students do read, they don't adapt their reading strategies according to genre and purpose, even when they fail. Students may be too hurried or too inexperienced to identify each genre's “roadmapping” or rhetorical organization, as well as the rhetorical codes that the author needs them to employ. On a more basic level, students don't parse syntax or look up vocabulary. Consequently they don't associate the text with its rhetorical environment or see themselves as the target of a rhetorical communication from the author. Lastly, instructors try to overcome these failures by lecturing over the text. But teachers “deprive students of the very practice and challenge they need to grow as readers... [T]eachers should send the signal that becoming an engaged reader is part of a student's homework component of a course” (Bean 163-8).
The alternative simple: work backwards from the abstract goals to the concrete challenges.

Students have poor reading processes,	so introduce them to scholarly reading practices, collect and check marginal notes, or monitor a set of guided reading journals.
Students fail to reconstruct arguments while they read,	so assign summary writing, compile marginal notes and assign groups to summarize disagreements, or go through the text and distinguish “what it is” and “what it does.”
Students fail to assimilate the unfamiliar,	so assign a fake author interview in the guided reading journal or prompt the class to debate a controversial thesis about the text.
Students have a limited understanding of the rhetorical context,	so create reading guides that synthesize general history and critical debates, or compile profiles of each author's preferred poetic devices.
Students are unfamiliar with cultural codes,	so create reading guides or ask students to do something creative, like draw comics, in a guided reading journal.

Some assignments aid reading in multiple ways: guided reading journals, reading guides, and marginal markup fill a large number of student needs. The Comparison Table shows how such assignments might be integrated (p. 10). But these assignments may be so far removed from students' expectations that the instructor may have to have an explicit conversation about how course assignments relate to course goals. And furthermore, students can read about their expectations in a well-designed rubric.

Guided reading journals

Guided reading journals can prompt students to reflect on their reading practices, assimilate the unfamiliar, and practice with unfamiliar cultural codes. Many instructors introduce reading practices in Introduction to Shakespeare, from sentence-level parsing to strategies of note-taking. The guided reading journal instruct students to apply both outside of class hours. Furthermore, the guided reading journal could compare these methods with the students' past methods through double-entry journaling. That is, each student could begin the semester by describing her reading and note-taking strategies. Then, twice in the rest of the semester, she can write and compare the strategies she's learned with her old entry in the guided reading journal.

Otherwise, the guided reading journal can provide an opportunity for imaginative reflection on some of the cultural codes that dominated Shakespeare's England. Students could be prompted to:

• imagine our own world with strict class and gender divisions
• imagine that their own friends were transported back to early modern England and had to attend a play or perform some other task
• imagine that Shakespeare had arrived in the current day and had to be introduced to social changes
• imagine that a “dark ages” had fallen between the Renaissance and the current day, and that Shakespeare's texts were treated in the same way as Milton or Jonson treated the classics
• propose a rewrite to small parts of Shakespeare's plays to completely change their rhetorical effect
• propose original stagings of Shakespeare's play to make them relevant to an audience of their friends or college peers

Of course these exercises could be disastrous without a proper introduction to the context of each class. Therefore accessible reading guides are essential.

Reading guides

Reading guides should help students understand the rhetorical context and general history of Shakespeare. Sounds simple, but it's hard. Bean outlines five specific uses for these: “[1] define key terms with special disciplinary meanings, [2] fill in needed cultural knowledge, [3] explain the rhetorical context of the reading, [4] illuminate the rhetorical purpose of genre convertions, [5] and ask critical questions for students to consider as they progress through the text” [numbers interpolated] (174). A reading guide for Macbeth, for example, would:

1. Introduce students to the meaning of some key terms, like “tragedy,” “act,” “scene,” “folio,” or even “equivocation.”

• The guided reading journal could ask students to imagine breaking a story they love (eg, Star Wars) into act and scene breaks.

2. Summarize the Scottish succession, and in turn to the Tudor succession, and songs from Middleton's The Witches.

• The guided reading journal could ask students to imagine an equivalent staging for Macbeth in the context of President Obama's first inauguration.

3. Explain James Stuart's writings on witches, the relation of James to the King's Men, and the royal performance of the Scottish play.

• The guided reading journal could prompt students to draw a comic or make a series of image macros expressing the awkwardness of the situation.

4. Explain some of the key concepts for reading Mackers, such as Divine Right and regicide; hamartia and dramatic irony.

• In turn, the guided reading journal could prompt the student to write about the tragic flaw of herself or someone she knows.

5. Suggest that students read to understand gender roles as represented in Macbeth, or the distinction between tyrants and good kings

• This could be adapted directly into a guided reading journal.

Marginal markup

I have consulted with many people, and even though most agree with the proposed activity of student glossing, everyone vigorously disagrees about how to collect and compare marginal markup. As I like to say, the fighting is so fierce because the stakes are so low. Below, I'll outline the strengths and weaknesses for four possible methods for marginal markup.

Marginal Markup Method	Strengths (in no order)	Weaknesses (in no order)
Collaboratively-edited XML document	XML is the emergent mode of descriptive Shakespeare bibliography, with several important scholarly projects in TEI-compliant XML. Students will be in contact with cutting-edge scholarship.	XML documents bust be well-formed, and may need to be valid.
	Scholars have already produced scholarly XML editions of Shakespeare's folios and quartos, ready for markup.	Students would need access to an XML editor, such as <oXygen> or emacs.
	Students can produce their own systems of tagging and reference, customized to each project	Students would need access to a computer, at least in small groups.
	XML tags and reference have been suggested to promote meta-cognition.	XML is hierarchical, restricting the kinds of markup that students can perform.
	XML is easily converted into HTML, so students could claim a web publication with only a little elbow grease.
	The DMP has significant experience with XML in the composition classroom, and can provide semester-long support.	The instructor has to manage a Subversion revision control system.
	XML is non-proprietary
	In the future, grants may be available for higher-level classes like this.	Students may feel less accountability in a class-wide project.
	Instructors can supervise collaboration.
Class wiki	Wikipedia is the dominant reference site on the web. Students can edit Wikipedia once introduced to wikicode.	Wikispace is proprietary.
	Instructors can supervise collaboration.
	Wikipedia can be integrated into the research process.	Wikicode has limited markup capacity
	Wikicode is more accessible than XML.	Students may feel less accountability in a class-wide project.
	A class wiki can be made public so that students can claim a web publication.
Small-group MS Word comments	MS Word is the dominant text editor in industry and the academy. Introducing students to the extended functionality of MS Word would probably provide the greatest payoff for the average student.	MS Word is proprietary.
		Students would have to independently coordinate to collaborate on a single document.
	MS Word is more accessible than XML or Wikicode.	MS Word is not imminently publishable.
	Small groups provide more accountability and motivation.	Instructors would have to manage comment-merging
Literal notes in literal book margins	Pen and paper is more accessible than XML, Wikicode, or MS Word.	Extremely difficult comment-merging
		Possibly decreased motivation from lack of collaboration.
	Individual projects provide the greatest level of accountability.	Severely limited publication potential.
		No compatibility to other systems of writing or research.

At the time of composition, the best choice seems to be a combination of a few systems. First, students should be introduced to a few markup activities in class, followed by out-of-class practice with the guided reading journal (ie pen and paper). Second, this pair of activities should be repeated a few times until students know enough markup activities—eg, marking unfamiliar vocabulary, syntax, references, locations, etc. Third, students should be assigned into small groups to apply these activities to a part of single play. Each small group may gloss a scene, and in sum, the entire class will gloss an entire play. Any technology's accessibility may be irrelevant: I suspect that there should be enough STEM students in Introduction to Shakespeare to support each small group with at least one person familiar with HTML—a close relative to wikicode and cousin to wikicode. Fourth, the instructor or suppport system can combine each small group's output into a single file or webpage, and use this as the basis for future discussion.

Comparison Table

Reading to Write about Shakespeare		Writing to Read Shakespeare
Weeks 1-9	Read 4-5 tragedies and histories	Week 1	Read 6 sonnets with introduction to reading with markup
		Weeks 2-9	Read 3-4 tragedies and histories
	Read 2-3 secondary articles, chapters, or anthology excerpts		Read 3-4 reading guides, summarizing critical trends
	Write first short response / close reading paper of 3-4 pages		Write guided reading journal: 2 pages each week; 16 pages total
			Write class markup activity: approximately 2 pages per student, 10 pages per group, 90 pages total
Weeks 10-15	Read 3-4 comedies	Weeks 10-13	Read 1-2 comedies
			Write template paper, 5-6 pages
	Write second short response / close reading paper of 3-4 pages	Weeks 14-15	Attend paper conferences
	Write annotated bibliography of 3-5 pages		Attend revision workshops
Exam week	Write final essay of 8-12 pages, based on annotated bibliography	Exam week	Write final essay of 7-10 pages, based on continuous scaffolding
Total:		Total:
7-9 primary sources read 2-3 secondary sources read; Other secondary sources synthesized into annotated bibliography 17-25 pages written with no inherent scaffolding 3 pieces of instructor feedback 0 instances of peer feedback		10-12 primary sources read 9-12 secondary sources synthesized into reading guides Other secondary sources synthesized into markup activity 30-34 pages written with inherent scaffolding 4 instances of instructor feedback 3 instances of peer feedback

Expected problems (Refutatio)

    If you were to show a Professor of Renaissance literature the alternatives above (p. 10), I can guarantee that they would almost universally favor the “Reading to Write about Shakespeare” class on the left. Ironically, that more traditional class contains less “content” than “Writing to Read Shakespeare,” and furthermore, the more traditional class engages students in less critical thinking. But the activities on the right are not without their critics.
    I talked to another colleague lately who protested: If you give the students all of these resources, when are they going to learn on their own? Let me be frank: there's no guarantee that anyone's going to learn anything. On the most fundamental level, I think that students can only ever learn on their own: but I digress. On a more practical level, the truth is that learning is hard. It's hard to learn new methods for writing and reading: even when explicitly taught the best known methods in a classroom; even for our most talented students. Our most talented students arrive in our classrooms after twelve years of public-school conditioning: conditioning to excel at standardized tests and memorize facts. From memorizing facts to thinking critically―and at times, thinking radically―about literature, our students need a bridge.  Our students need a bridge to the original research that Shakespeare instructors crave.

Where's the paper?

The final paper is the ne plus ultra of college English classes. I can't explain why, but there seems to be an obligation for a 7+ page final paper in every English class hidden somewhere in the Constitution. The ubiquity of this assignment has two effects: first, the final paper seems more and more important; second, there are more and more values attributed to the final papers. In conversations with other instructors, I have heard final papers praised as being complex and unified; witty and straightforward; faithful to sources and adventurous; focused and wide-reaching. It's possible that all of these contradictions can be resolved, but regardless, they show that there is a sort of crisis surrounding the final paper.
Remember that the dream of a “Reading to Write” classroom is a piece of original research. That's the dream, but the reality typically follows the numbers 7, 5, and 3: a seven-page book report in five-paragraph format thrown together over a three-day weekend. As described above, the typical final paper leaves an instructor feeling frustrated and disappointed; students can feel completely stranded and desperate as they struggle to meet the minimum page-count requirements. And worst of all, this type of assignment is most vulnerable to plagiarism: there are oodles of this whole kit and kaboodle on Google.
And yet, none of this is to refute the importance of “the paper.” My counter-proposal adds three dimensions to this classic assignment: scaffolding, or progressive completion and feedback; templates, or suggested outlines; and repeated feedback in drafts, rubrics, and conferences.

“Scaffolding” assignments

Scaffolding metaphorically builds bridges from reading to writing. In more practical terms, it prompts students to practice skills that will be necessary for some ultimate task. Surprisingly, scaffolding provides an effective buffer against plagiarism. A plagiarized paper stands out in sharp relief from the scaffolded assignments that a student has already composed. Moreover, the scaffolded assignments should reduce the attitudes of fear and cynicism that typically lead to plagiarism.

More profoundly, scaffolded assignments can introduce students to nearly every aspect of academic writing. To name a few:

• Evidence and logical claims
• Grammar and clarity
• Structure and outlines
• Revision and feedback
• Rhetorical situation, genre, and disciplinary conventions

Ideally both of the assignments described above (guided reading journals, marginal markup) provides students with a base of evidence. Further exercises, such as a template paper, can provide students with rhetorical and generic models for composition.

Template papers

A template is as it sounds, a pre-packaged series of compositional moves that can be transformed into a rudimentary argument with the inclusion of some basic findings. The template can be more or less restrictive, ranging from cloze deletions to rough outlines:

Thesis templates

[A] and [B] seem like different [Y], but I'll show how they're both actually [Z].

Paragraph outline

Topic sentence. First thought / simple problem. Second thought / complication. New information / resolution. Comparison with first thought. Return to topic level.

Sentence-level outline

Based on yesterday's discussion, our class hasn't resolved the question of [A]. Several of my classmates argued that [B]. I agree with them that [C]. However, they are mistaken when they [D]. In contrast, I argue that [E]. (Bean 155)

I understand that these templates sound uninspired and mechanical. However, there are three advantages to templates, two of which are based precisely on the mechanical nature of these prompts. First, disciplinary conventions are much more mechanical than scholars will generally acknowledge. Any scholar after PhD exams knows how to skim an article or monograph based on standard scholarly roadmapping. Second, students can achieve a more complex kind of creativity by first acknowledging disciplinary conventions—in this case, through templates—and only after that, breaking from convention in an informed fashion. Third, students can easily evaluate each others' early drafts with mutual knowledge of these templates.

Draft evaluation

The scaffolded writing process demands early and frequent feedback. Again, this sounds like a nightmare to the instructor still facing a pile of uncollected papers that are bathed in red markup. But peer feedback solves the two root problems in this situation. The first root problem is the level of feedback that instructors feel obligated to provide. In-text comments, available through most word processors, enable instructors' bad habits of commenting on grammar, formatting, etc. This is not an effective application of the instructors' expertise. The most effective to provide line-by-line feedback is to ask students to collaborate. The second root problem is asymmetry: students so outnumber instructors that instructors cannot evaluate everything both quickly and fully. Peer feedback, obviously, has no such asymmetry.
The most effective way to conduct out-of-class peer review appears to be Calibrated Peer Review, a free web-based problem structured around a series of yes/no peer review question and supplemented with example student papers ranging from excellent, acceptable, and unacceptable. I must hazard that I haven't yet used this system, but it seems fundamentally promising.
There are, of course, alternatives based in class time and on class discussion boards. They should be equally effective, but require more legwork by the instructor.

Rubrics to comments

I am an avowed proponent of rubrics 3. Not only do rubrics effectively set the terms of the assignment, but they also enable fast and well-structured feedback that can make the best use of the instructor's expertise—with a little spreadsheet magic.
When I prepare to evaluate a large number of papers in a cursory manner, I set up a spreadsheet with three pages. On the first page, I have a list of student names along the side, and a list of the rubric criteria along the top, followed to the right by a repeated list of criteria listing the weight assigned to each. On the second page, I have the same list of criteria, but with each criterion expanded into three columns: the center column contains a fully grammatical explanation of a common type of problem with this paper, including references to the writing textbook and examples; the left column includes a “tag” to describe this feedback; the right column includes a score that relates the kind of feedback in the center to the weight of the criterion. On the first page, I can enter the “tag” next to the student name under the appropriate criterion. Then, under the repeated list to the right, an automated formula returns the appropriate grade from the second sheet to the first sheet, based on the tag supplied. That formula is something like,

=VLOOKUP($B3;$'Tags Feedback and Grades'.$A$2:$C$12;3;0)

Further to the right, another formula sums the grades assigned by this formula. This second formula is as simple as

=SUM(3*SUM(F3:H3);I3)

and a third formula translates this into a letter grade. That third formula looks like,

=IF(K3>93;"A.";IF(K3>90;"A-.";IF(K3>87;"B+.";IF(K3>83;"B.";IF(K3>80;"B-.";IF(K3>77;"C+.";IF(K3>73;"C.";IF(K3>70;"C-.";IF(K3>67;"D+.";IF(K3>60;"D.";"E."))))))))))

Then, on the third sheet, another formula looks up the tags listed on the first sheet and the discursive feedback defined on the second sheet and combines all of this with the final grade, described above, and a general header. This formula looks like this:=$A$1&$A2&", "&$B$1&" (a) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.B3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$A$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$C$12;2;0)&" (b) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.C3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$D$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$F$12;2;0)&" (c) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.D3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$G$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$I$12;2;0)&" (d) "&VLOOKUP('Close Reading_2'.E3;'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$J$2:'Close Reading Definitions_2'.$L$12;2;0)&$C$1&$'Close Reading_2'.L3&$D$1&$E$1
This final text field produces a paragraph of feedback in plain English, personalized to each student, that addresses the most common problems in a student's paper and creates a grade.
Obviously, this method doesn't address the entire paper. It's hard to set enough spreadsheet definitions to account for wit, invention, or the thousand natural shocks that grammar is err to. But in the final stage, the instructor can add more notes the old-fashioned way, and likewise adjust any grades that seem to be mis-calibrated by the spreadsheet.
I find this system extremely advantageous. First, it guarantees consistency in initial grades and feedback. Second, it saves instructors the intense labor of repeating feedback. Third, it allows instructors to maximize the quality of feedback provided to those most-common complaints: instructors are free to list textbook examples, explain a problem at length, etc., whether a problem appears once or a hundred times. Fourth and finally, this system saves incredible amounts of time. At its most extreme, I have graded upwards of 70 papers in two evenings with this system.

Last first thoughts (Peroratio)

    In sum, Introduction to Shakespeare ought to contain frequent, well-designed composition components. Those composition components are closer than the normal design to our shared goals of critical thinking. Critical thinking benefits from writing assignments that have interactive components, meaning-making activities, and clear statements of instructors' goals. To achieve these goals, I suggest scaffolded assignments based around guided reading journals, reading guides, in-text markup or glossing. To deal with this superflux of writing, I recommend that the assignments are scaffolded on each other, and sometimes are based around templates. I further recommend that students provide frequent peer feedback and that instructors use rubrics and spreadsheets to conserve their time in favor of expert-level judgments.