Evaluating anyone’s writing can be a difficult and sensitive job, which not many people would want to do. However, evaluating the writing of your students is very important as it only through evaluating their work can we help them in improving their writing skills.
Tips on How to Evaluate Writing :
Evaluating writing is a very subjective thing, but you can make use of some tools and criteria to evaluate your students or child’s writing in an objective manner.
Objective evaluation of a written piece helps you to assess the quality of work effectively even when it is uninteresting. This article will give you some guidelines on how to evaluate writing objectively. These tips can be used by teachers or even students themselves for improving the quality of their writing.
Evaluation guidelines
- Content and Ideas: The first thing to consider is the content of the written piece and the idea it conveys. The reason for writing the article should be clear and concise. Each paragraph in the article must be consistent with the overall theme and the message being conveyed must be understandable to the reader.
- Voice: Voice is something that gives that special flavor to your article. As students write continuously, they will develop their own voice and slowly learn to maintain the same voice throughout their work.
- Word Choice: Young writers can choose a variety of adverbs and adjectives to help them communicate their ideas more effectively to the reader. Over time, they need to replace with appropriate adjectives and stronger words, conveying the same meaning. The use of thesaurus will enable them to improve their writing and build a stronger vocabulary.
- Fluency: Writers should avoid monotony by ensuring that they do not use the same sentence structure all the time. Making variations in the type of sentences will make the article more readable and interesting.
- Organization: The structure of the article must be clearly thought out, with each paragraph having a proper opening and ending. The paper must have a proper introduction, body and conclusion.
- Conventions: This includes grammar, spellings, paragraphing and punctuation. The main thing that students often struggle with is paragraphing. They need to begin each paragraph in such a way that it is exciting and captivating.

There are also a number of other options for evaluating writing, which are as follows:
- Evaluate all the articles written by the student in one go instead of assessing single articles.
- Giving different grades for content and form of the article.
- Use of performance grading by giving credits or points to students after deciding on an acceptable amount of work to be done.
- Use of impression marking to assess the paper based on your general feeling about the paper when you read it.
Giving students proper feedback also forms an important part of evaluating writing. To ensure that you are giving them proper feedback, follow these steps:
- Give suggestions that are specific to the article that you are giving feedback on. Avoid generalizing your feedback.
- Respond to them as a reader and not as a grader. This will help students to realize what effect their writing has on readers.
- Give such a feedback that it establishes future goals for students.
- Finally, you must ask questions that will help your students to develop and improve their writing.
