How do you use the red pen?
As a student, especially in K-12, the red pen was the authority indicating error. There, I learned that you measured the quality of writing by the number of errors it contained. The upside of that method was that it forced me to learn my grammar. The downside was that it tended to reward a certain predictability. (Five paragraphs, topic sentences...)
In college, the red pen came very late, when it came at all. It tended to be more cryptic than in high school, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not. But I had grown to fear it less. In grad school, the red pen was mostly used to indicate ideological objections, as opposed to “errors” in the sense that most people use the term. (Some actually used the term “ideological errors,” but I tried to avoid those people.)
I didn’t encounter a thoughtful conversation about the use of the red pen until I had to t.a. some English composition classes. Rutgers put social science doctoral students through a year or two of English comp t.a.’ing back then -- I don’t know if it still does -- and in that context, that meant being the instructors of record for our own sections. To its credit, the English department there understood that, say, political scientists have not been taught how to teach writing, so it established a three day boot camp in writing instruction that we had to attend before we were loosed on unsuspecting freshmen.
That boot camp was one of the most valuable professional development experiences I’ve ever had. And it was all about the red pen.
People who had studied the ways that students learn how to write -- which is not necessarily the same group as “people who study literature” -- had found “patterns of error” that students fell into when they were trying to stretch as writers. The point of the boot camp was to help us distinguish between errors of laziness or ignorance, and errors of attempted growth. The goal was to use the red pen in traditional ways on the former, but to be much more thoughtful about the latter.
Among other things, I was told that the number of “surface errors” -- the kind of mistakes that summoned the red pen reliably in high school -- would actually increase as students moved from simple autobiographical writing to more difficult subjects about which they were less sure. But the attempt to move from simple to complex engagement should be encouraged. Too aggressive a job of error-catching could actually arrest students in a developmental stage.
The concept struck me as both liberatory and wise. It was liberatory in the sense that I could take off the green eyeshade while grading. And it was wise in that it replaced mere error-catching with an attempt to recognize the student as capable of more. I can’t say I always got it right in the implementation, but the concept stuck with me.
In administration, I’ve fallen back on the idea of “errors of growth” quite a bit. When people step outside of their usual routines and try to do more, there’s an initial phase in which they often make some pretty basic mistakes. There’s a reason that software experts advise never buying a version that ends in point-zero. But if you never roll out version 1.0, you’ll never get to the subsequent versions. The key is in distinguishing between the errors you need to jump on, and the ones that are actually positive signs.
Not everybody has figured this out. Some wield the red pen in the old k-12 style, attacking every mistake with equal relish. When the two styles coexist in the same organization, the messages can get pretty confusing. The styles each make sense on their own terms, but they don’t mesh well. When multiple red pens are in the picture, each with its own set of rules, it’s easy for the author of the paper to get flustered. That’s true on dissertation committees, and it’s true in organizations.
Wise and worldly readers, have you found ways of making things work when people are using different approaches to their red pens?
