“A”
“Good paper, A.”
That’s it, that’s all. Apparently, Profs don’t comment on A papers. So when I actually had a prof comment on a rough draft of mine “Expand this” and “Elaborate on this quote” and “You didn’t quite hit your thesis” and “Reference error” I honestly didn’ tknow what to do with myself. Nobody had ever dne that before! I had to go talk to him to figure out what he wanted from me.
A very common comment on my papers in college was “your introduction is your conclusion, and vice versa.” I was always having to reverse the order of my papers (not necessarily changing content.)
I guess I have a habit of beginning by stating my conclusion. Ah well.
BTW, the passive voice is not always wrong, even if MS word thinks so. Something the “active” alternative is hopelessly complex and difficult to understand. You may be creating awkward sentences in your herculean effort to avoid the passive voice (something I think is overstressed a little in high school).
“wordy” can mean too many words or a um… pretentious choice of words. For example using the word “explicate” when “explain” will do. Remember: brevity is the soul of wit. 
I always got something like “Interesting idea”. Which is stunning, because I only wrote papers for my non-major classes and they were generally pieces of crap that barely met the word limit.
Now my papers just say: “Wake up, this is a dream. You don’t have to write papers anymore so stop panicking.”.
If it’s hand-written, I get the: “Could you please write bigger?” comments. (My ‘offical’ writing, that is, when I’m writing something to be turned in, is rather teeny-tiny, along the lines of 12-point font or smaller if I’m using a good pen that doesn’t bleed.)
If it’s typed up… Hm. Mostly things like ‘elegantly stated’, ‘well thought out’, ‘expand on this’, ‘awkward wording’, and/or ‘wordy’. (The latter come into play when I’m trying to pad out for length, because of #$* minimum length requirements, but there really isn’t anything more I can say.)
<< Bee-bop-a-lu-la. >>
Hey even instructor’s make whopping mistakes… I just got blasted in this thread for my writing…
Hey it’s the end of the semester and even instructors get tired and cranky!
“What you have here is what I’ve come to expect - excellent work, Fine command of material + cogent analysis. The only weakness is what’s not here…you could have put a few more pages to very good use.”
From my A- National Security paper. 
Yes! I get that “Good idea, expand on this” business a lot too. No! I don’t wanna expand on this. “This” isn’t going in the direction of my paper. I recently got a paper back that read “Good. B+” and that was it. Eh? I should have given it back to him and added “Expand on this please.”
I once had a TA who had an interesting grading style. He’d write comments like “purple unicorn” and “rainbow popcorn” on our papers, then he’d ask us in class if we had any questions about his comments. It was his way of making sure we were reading them.
He also hid our letter grade somewhere frustrating, like under the staple, so we had to read everything to find out how we’d done. I don’t think it worked the way he wanted it to, but it’s good for story value anyway.
I got “save the gerund!” once. My teacher was a bit…stressed over the misuse of gerunds at the time and it was her mantra.
Other than that, I tend to get “good!” and “excellent!” written on my papers just above the little question marks with statements like “Is this a word?”.
I tended to get things like “interesting, but I wanted 5-7 pages, not 10.” I have a horrid habit of writing too much and leaving it all in rather than trying to be more concise once I’ve got things written up.
Wait, wait.
You mean you people can actually read the comments your professors put on your papers?
I have HORRIBLE writing. I can barely read it. All of my teachers have made it a point of forbiding me to hand in anything more then 1 paragraph long unless it’s typed. Very annoying.
But, when it IS typed, for some reason, they lke it!
Theres the odd “Slow down”, “you lost points for the hasiness of it” and others like that because I tend to rush through them otherwise I don’t get them done, But I’ve gotten alot of commetns saying that what I wrote wasn’t what they would expect of a grade 10 level, but of a grade 12, which did nothing but boost my ego.
I do get reprimanded for being too emotional and imaginitive sometimes, and theres been more then once that I’ve gotten in trouble for using swears. 
Not my fault if they just seemed to “fit”
I got Ugh!!! once in college. I was afraid to ask what was wrong with it, but I got a B, so it couldn’t have been all that bad.
My ninth-grade history teacher had the habit of making notes like “Do you know what this word means?” when I used words longer than one syllable (basically, any word he had to look up in the dictionary). He was one of three teachers I’ve had that I’m pretty sure knew less about the subjects they taught than I did.
wmulax93 - I hate when professors write “expand.” My last English prof. told me to expand everything when the paper was already within page requirements. One time her suggestion would have involved me writing a 10 page paper (3 more than the max) if I had expanded everything.
Another problem I seem i have is my lack of comma use. , I hate those thing! lol
My husband teaches at our local branch campus. He says he’d * love * to get a paper he could write “Wordy” on.
Unfortunately, a good deal of his comments must be aimed at those who triple space, use size 14 fonts, and leave huge margins in an effort to stretch a paragraph into a four-page paper.
I’ve read a lot of the papers. Some of them are painfully bad. It’s not uncommon to get papers in which tenses are mixed within the same sentance, incredibly bad spelling, or a lack of punctuation. Some of them read like a 14-year old girl’s chat log. (Instead of “clarify” or “awkward” he should write “Huh? What? Dude, I read this * three times * and it still makes no sense.”) It’s the utter lack of effort which makes these kinds of papers so frustrating.
Most of my teachers, for whatever reason, are assigning papers on copyright and trademark laws, along with other elements of these. I think there have been some problems with plagiarism at my school, and so the teachers are trying to drill copyright laws into our heads.
Anyway, the comment I have been getting most is “Copyright on a work does NOT start as soon as that work is written.” Every time, I have had to go to the US Copyright Office’s web site, print out the source (because they didn’t look at the bibliography), and show it to them.
One particularly obnoxious moment was in my Multimedia class. The student grader wrote “WRONG!!! CHECK YOUR SOURCES” in huge, sprawling letters at the top of my paper, saying the exact same thing every teacher has. His words just looked so gleeful that it grated on me.
My English teacher doesn’t really offer constructive criticism right now. He mostly just goes through and gives you a rubric score (my school district uses a rubric system of 6 categories and a score of 1-6 in each category). Mostly I tend to get graded down (a 4 or a 5) on the ‘Voice’ category, compared to mostly 5s and 6s on the rest.
The thing is that I never know exactly how much voice teachers want in a paper. I can put a lot of voice into a personal narrative, but research papers and so forth are more difficult. It’s also difficult to figure out your strengths and weaknesses based on six different vague categories, but I digress.
Yes, they do! (Your possessive should be a plural.)
And about that “expand” remark, even though the page limit has been reached. I always tell my students (I’m a writing instructor at a university) that making a paper longer doesn’t make it better, and that the most common conceptual mistake in writing a school paper is too broad a focus. “Expand” doesn’t always mean to lengthen the paper; it can mean to take out half of what you have and expand on the other half.
Nowadays, my students are mostly Korean, which means non-native speakers. My most common comments revolve around technical accuracy–subject/verb agreement, verb tense, articles and such. When I taught in the US, I also asked my students to expand and explain more. I didn’t want the whole paper expanded, only the parts that were insufficiently explained. It wasn’t unusual for me to read an entire paper and find exactly one sentence that genuinely made a significant point. In such cases, the rest of the paper should have been scrapped, and the new paper built around that one sentence, with good explanations and examples.
Many of the papers I received were basically just rough drafts or free-writing exercises, sometimes with a little proofreading done. Re-writing doesn’t mean correcting the spelling mistakes; it means re-conceiving the point of the paper, and often starting over. Sometimes more than once. Some papers are so far from being ready to turn in that it’s hard to give specific criticism. I don’t know where to begin until the student puts a little more into it.
I too write fewer comments on good papers. It takes a long time to grade a stack of papers, and the ones that need the most work get the most of my attention. Unfortunately, this can make the better students feel ignored.
Oh, and the most common comments I got as a student were things like “excellent.” I don’t boast much; I don’t have that much to boast about. Writing is the only thing I’ve ever consistently been told that I do fairly well. (Okay, there’s one more thing, but let’s keep this clean.
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