Evaluation vs. Grading in Honors Composition Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Grades and Love Teaching

As a professor of composition and technical communication, I have had extensive training for and experience with evaluating student writing. The intellectual work of composition as an academic discipline manifests itself in three areas: rhetorically-based composition theory, empirical research of both qualitative and quantitative natures, and—unlike other disciplines aside from education—the applications of that theory and research to build sound teaching practices. In the pedagogical third of our scholarship, compositionists learn not only to design syllabi and assignments that will meet educational goals for students who will need to argue, research, and write at the postsecondary level, but also to establish criteria and develop techniques for useful evaluation of student performance