After spending hours grading essays, I developed a quicker rubric that cut my time in half. I found that I was writing the same comment on many papers. This rubric has the major/common areas that need improvement: punctuation, spelling, simple word usage, lack of support/elaboration, lack of transition words, and simple sentence usage. For example when I come to one of these problems in the essay I write "T" when transition words are needed, or "SP" when a word is expected to be spelled corr