Marcia Hilsabeck, a former AP teacher and AP Summer Institute Coordinator/Presenter from Round Rock, Texas, is credited for first introducing me to this marvelous strategy for providing students with feedback to their writing at a glance. I have used this strategy for many years with an assortment of grade levels and abilities. Not only do students enthusiastically respond to this type of feedback, but it can easily become a springboard for a discussion in peer editing or student-teacher writing conferences .
Pink, yellow, green, orange, and blue highlighters are used to mark syntax, mechanics, diction, and the well written/"good stuff" in an essay. With one glance, students see their frequent errors and are positively rewarded for thoughtfully crafted, finely honed phrasing.
Here's how I use the colors:
Pink - mechanics/grammar & usage/ punctuation errors such as commas in a series, spelling, capitalization, etc.
Yellow - overuse of "to be" verbs (am, is, are, was, were), and/or pronouns
Orange - syntax errors such as run-ons, sentence fragments, comma splices, or wordiness
Blue - wrong word, pronoun/antecedent errors, diction problems
Green - The well written sentence, outstanding "turn of a phrase", exemplary use of literary devices
There are several options for using this color-coded feedback method. Teacher or student can use one color for one type of problem per draft. For example, I may tell my class that for this draft I am going to concentrate of syntax errors because we just spent time examining and working with sentence fragments, run-on sentences, and sentence combining techniques. So in this instance, only the orange highlighter will be used to draw attention to specific sentence errors requiring revision. For a final draft, I would use all the colors. Students are aiming for a paper that only has green markings because that would indicate the well written, really awesome "stuff." Students especially like "going for the green."
