This article deals with the analysis of a high school English essay rubric and is intended to help students better understand their teachers’ expectations for them and their essays.
Consider the following rubric
The above English essay rubric is divided into four major sections, each composed of two sub-sections (see below). I’ll consider each of these sections in turn.
Knowledge/Understanding (K/U)
Thinking/Inquiry (T/I)
Communication (C)
Application (A)
Knowledge/Understanding
Knowledge of Content & Understanding of Content: does the student show that they understand the text? Now, a student’s understanding of the text can be different from their teacher’s. If the student sees the text in one way and the teacher doesn’t understand, acknowledge, or believes that the understanding is incorrect, the student doesn’t get a grade for this. If you believe a character acted out of hate, but the teacher believes they acted out of love, you’re not going to get the grade for it.
Knowledge of form, elements of style, and language conventions: Does the student acknowledge literary devices and traditional novel structures (character, setting, plot, narration, themes, and conflict)? Does the student acknowledge and show an understanding of the specific thing that the essay is going to be about (a particular theme, a particular issue, whatever is in the essay requirements). As a student, your first goal is to acknowledge the existence of the element (literary device, character issue, or specific essay related prompt). Then, you have to explain its importance. Again, the question of explanation is whether you can understand the text in the same way as your teacher. If your interpretations of what happened agree, then you get the grade.
Knowledge of the literary essay form including strong thesis: is your thesis ‘strong’? Your teacher will likely have provided a guide for you for writing a strong thesis statement. You should use that guide. Apply it to the letter. Even if the guide is objectively wrong and leads you to forming a weak thesis statement from the point of view of other writings, it doesn’t matter. The teacher provides the guide, everyone follows it, and who follows it the best, gets the best grades. In terms of essay structure, you will likely receive instructions about how to put your essay together. This includes what the introductory paragraph, body paragraphs, and conclusion paragraph should include, the organization of information. Again, follow this to the letter whenever possible. If something seems illogical, remember everyone in your class is doing the same thing, and whoever sticks to the criteria the best, gets the best grade.
A note before moving on. You’ll notice two principles at play here: the fact that your grades depend on the teacher’s subjective understanding of the play and whether or not they understand your writing as well as how well you can follow instructions. English classes are not about intelligence or good ideas. So, the priority is to check all the boxes with regards to their instructions. If you do that, you get a good grade, neglect it, and they’ll punish you for it in entirely unreasonable ways (i.e. losing 10% of your grade because you forgot to put a few in-text citations and missed a comma). This is to say that proofreading is an important task for your paper. You need to try and finish an essay 2 or 3 days before its due date in order to give you time to proofread it for missing information once, and for finalized essay features (i.e. good grammar and vocabulary) the second time.
A note about asking for feedback: don’t be afraid to ask your teachers for feedback. Asking them, “is this a good argument, a good thesis idea, a good paragraph” or whatever is actually a great idea. They may throw curveballs your way (oh by the way please change your thesis and your argument is invalid…. A day before you have to submit the paper) but it's better they throw them and you pivot, then to pay the price later on with a poor grade.
A note about expectations: never expect 90% or 80% or even a passing grade on an English essay. The whole thing is graded erratically and is entirely up to whatever mental health problems and moods your teacher is dealing with that day. Your job is to create a perfect paper that aligns as close to their expectations as possible. Beyond that, you leave it to God to see you through. Have zero expectations, have a mindset of understanding your mistakes and talking to your teacher and performing to their expectations, and you’ll survive English classes in high school. This isn’t logical with multiple choice like math or science.
Thinking/Inquiry
brainstorming/planning sheets/thesis creation show generation of ideas, organization of information: basically, this is your rough draft, your note-taking, etc. My hunch is that your teachers want to see some sort of progression between your notes and your essay because it's really, really easy to find someone to write your essays for you. But, then again it’s really easy to find someone who’ll write the essay and the rough draft and notes for you too, so I don’t know what the purpose of all the note-taking is. In any case, your grade apparently depends on it, so don’t forget to submit your rough draft and notes.
Rough draft shows research (textual support), critical analysis and critical literacy in writing, editing and revising an essay - did you spend time cutting apart your rough draft?: So, this is a great example of English teacher lunacy. You have a limited amount of time to write your essay. Not only are you expected to write this anxiety-inducing monster for a teacher who expects politically-correct garbage. You are supposed to write TWO of them. The instruction is, put your best effort into a rough draft, THEN, for the next few days, rewrite it. Look at the issues in your essay, fix them, have someone look them over, identify problems, and start re-writing. Basically, if you have 4 days to write an essay from start to finish, on Day 1, you should have all the planning done and the structure of the paper; on day 2, you should have the rough draft completed; on day 3 you should revise the whole thing, identify all of the problems in it; and on day 4, you fix all of the problems and submit it. I actually have no problem with the writing process; it’s a correct one, but the texts students are asked to read, the interpretations they’re expected to make, and the timelines they’re expected to stick to are all lunacy.
Focus on consistent idea within novel; critical analysis and critical literacy in writing, editing, and revising an essay: The phrases critical analysis and critical literacy are meaningless until you guess at them. If your teacher wants you to identify literary devices and that’s THE ONLY THING THEY WROTE IN THE RUBRIC, it would initially be logical to assume that, “ok they only want me to identify a metaphor and move on, right?” WRONG. Sadly, wrong. English teachers, like shy, frustrating human beings, don’t express what they want. It’s up to you to figure it out. “Why has the teacher said they want me to talk about literary devices?” Well, maybe they want to see, what you think about those literary devices, why the author put those literary devices in, how those devices affect the reading experience, etc. Basically, they want you to express your thoughts on them, any thoughts at all. And then, they’ll do a cruel thing, they’ll grade your thoughts. If they like your thoughts, you get a good grade, if they thought your thoughts were too simplistic or boring for them to read, they’ll give you a bad grade. The thinking section is based on your analysis in your body paragraphs. If your teacher likes your analysis, if they were entertained by it, if they actually agreed with it and maybe even saw something new and interesting about the novel, there’s your A+. So, after you finish writing your rough draft, take a look at what you’ve written and ask yourself and peer editors: is this an interesting conclusion or thought? If it’s not, you’ll have to change your evidence, your argument, and your thesis. It’s a painful process.
Writing a rough draft: in an ideal world, the rough draft is perfectly written and applies all writing conventions that you’ve been asked to apply and with the best arguments, etc. You then take a break from writing for a day and start looking for deficits and double checking yourself. “Did I interpret this correctly? Is this idea logical? Where are my writing problems?” You go through that process or perhaps a peer editor helps with that, but that gives you information to get your revised draft (final copy) going. Your rough draft SHOULD be your best work, and then your final draft is the result of a serious proofreading of your rough copy.
Communication
Expression and organization of ideas and information; communication for different audiences and purposes; use of conventions: this is pretty straightforward. Your teacher is going to provide you with a writing style guide, with MLA citation guide, just follow them, when you proofread your rough draft and your final draft, just make sure you follow these.
A note to ESL students: this part is going to be sort of unfair to you. Because English isn’t your first language, you’re necessarily going to lose grades in some areas. This doesn’t mean you give up. You can still get a decent communication grade if you follow MLA style requirements and you proofread your work to be as clear as possible. The more practice you have writing essays, the better your general English writing skills will become.
Application
This one is a bit of a mystery to me. They a section on “opening and closing thoughts” and I suppose that’s just a question of how well you execute the conclusion paragraph.
A note about the interaction between an essay’s requirements and the rubric: teachers don’t tell you everything that’s going to be on the essay in the requirements portion. I don’t know why, but they always sneak in some additional requirements in the rubric itself. For example:
“make recommendations, inferences and reflections about author’s take on life”
“connections made between text and world, humanity”
If you see this sort of stuff in your rubric, understand that, even if it's not in the essay prompt, you WILL be graded on whether you include these portions or not. So, pay some kind of lip service (offhand remark, some extra little bullshit afterthought) to these things that they’re asking you to do. Again, it’s important to do these stupid little things because failure to do so may cause serious grade penalties.
Conclusion
So, I’ve shared my thoughts above regarding English essay rubric. To be clear, I’ve never worked within a school and I’ve not been trained to analyze these rubrics. My comments are based on nearly a decade of experience helping students write essays. There are likely ways of thinking that English teachers are trained in that I don’t understand yet. But hopefully in the future, they will become more clear to me.
As a final thought, one wonders what the purpose of this intensive essay writing experience is in the first place. We never have to write essays outside of high school; this is a fact. Some students may go on to news article writing, magazine writing, etc but they’ll never have to write literary analysis papers in the form that they’re taught to do so in high school. What is the value of an essay from the point of view of improving general literacy?
Essays force students to read text and then re-read it. They force them to try to read text from new perspectives, and in doing so, learn that text, when viewed from different points of view yields unique lessons. Essays force students not only to think about the materials they’re reading, but also to think about the viewpoints of their teachers, their audience. Writing an essay means trying to understand who you’re writing for, an important skill in communication. Besides that, they are assignments which force students to practice writing, re-writing, note-taking, and organizational skills. They challenge students to read text, annotate it, connect it to the real world, and then re-read text quickly in order to make connections. Essays can be, and often are, tedious, awful and stressful assignments. However, they produce, in my opinion, a very powerful learning outcome for students and I am grateful for the English teachers that have produced these assignments.