Lärares uppfattning om den goda uppsatsen i slutet av 1800-talet

This article is an investigation of teachers’ corrections and comments on graduation essays from the 1870s. Our aim is to learn more about the linguistic norms in Swedish secondary schools at the time, such as they appear in this specific context. The study is based on 13 graduation essays (in total 7,184 words) from one secondary school (Högre Allmänna Läroverket i Falun). There are 532 corrections and comments in the texts, corresponding to an average of 7.4 corrections/comments per 100 words. Corrections and comments are thus very common in the texts that we have investigated. Many of the corrections focus on textual details, such as the choice of words and sentence structure, but by no means are all of the corrections due to incorrect language use. Rather, it seems that many of the corrections target the style of essays. Corrections or comments concerning the structure of the texts are very rare. Most of the comments made by teachers are in the category called focusing, i.e. co-appearing with a correction in the text. None of the essays contain positive feedback from the teacher, which we believe could be significant for the correction norm at the time