Correcting work

At some point your desk turns into a war zone with piles of marked and unmarked papers. If you do the digital thing, you have a slew of unread emails with (and occasionally without) attachments in your inbox or a virtual pile on whatever digital blackboard system your school uses. How to attack this task? I think you need to consider a few issues to determine the extent of your correcting.

1. What was the purpose of the assignment?
Sometimes, you may not need to look for errors in language, so why spend time doing this? After a field trip to London, my students had to write a report about their daily activities. The main point was to prove they hadn't wasted all their time drinking and shopping. Obviously, they had to write this in English, but it was a communicative exercise and not about language. Also, if students are writing an argument, it may be more useful to (at least at first) look for problems in their thinking rather than how it was said. Finally, if you're teaching subject matter, e.g. finance, psychology, or history, it's probably more important to see they understood the concept than anything else. In such cases, you might just be wasting time when you correct linguistic mistakes. I personally would read the assignment and only comment on mistakes if they occur frequently or seriously impede on understanding on the reader's part.

2. What language points should the students get from this?
If the purpose is language learning, consider what mistakes you're going to correct. If the class is high level, this might be a non-issue, but it's rather demoralizing for weaker students to get their papers back riddled with red ink (or Word comment boxes). It might be more useful for both you and them to focus on correcting the 3-5 major issues, ranked I'd say on how often these occur and how much they interfere with the message. Obviously, grammar or vocabulary issues you've recently covered in class should be on the list.

3. How much detail are you going to provide? Will they be required to hand in a corrected version?
Depending on the student's level and whether the assignment has to be submitted again, you could vary the detail you offer in your corrections. For my junior groups I only highlight problematic areas in the Word document they sent me and email it back to them. I don't give any indication as to what type of error they made. Student who care will look, think about their corrections, and ask me in class about certain ones they didn't understand. Students who don't care will probably not take a second glance, and then I haven't wasted my time correcting something in great detail for people who don't wish to bother. Since these juniors don't have a second chance at handing it in, it's up to them whether they actually want to spend time correcting it. Obviously, I do discuss the most common problems in class, so that everyone should get some idea what they might have done wrong.

However, for lower level classes that were purely about writing, I have used correction symbols to indicate the type of error made. This is much more time-consuming and tiring on your part, so I would correct only the main issues and only if the students had to actually use this information to produce a corrected second version. Otherwise, you'll just see the fruit of your hard labor disappear to the bottom of their bags or find out the reverse side is being used for some artful doodling.

Conclusion
Don't waste time correcting papers in detail if this doesn't serve the purpose of the assignment or if students don't have a clear reason to look at them. Even if you want to correct and this will be useful, think about what is important and whether you'll spend time offering hints to help with correction. Teachers like to think students really consider comments, but for plenty of them this is an embarrassing exercise they'd rather avoid. Confrontation with your own mistakes and criticism regarding your work aren't easy to deal with after all. The only way to get everyone (and not just the highly-motivated students) to use your corrections is by attaching some form of potential reward or punishment to it.