Almost to Satirical to be Real
I hope this is a joke, but fear that it is true. BlogCritics is posting on a Boston Globe article that teachers (presumably not in the red states!) are moving away from correcting papers in red ink because they fear it hurts self-esteem. It sounds eerily similar to this, which actually is a joke. I called that story "Almost to Real to be Satire", thus the name of this post.
I wonder if red ink hurts self-esteem more than, say, graduating high school and not being able to read.
Chris Yeh:
The funny thing is, correcting in colors other than red actually works.
When I was in college at Stanford, I was a Freshman writing tutor for two years. These freshmen were used to being deified by their high school teachers, and the notion that they needed help with their writing style was quite a shock to them.
Many of them had barely seen corrections to their papers, let alone the sea of red ink that I tended to pour out over their creations.
The more sensitive felt shame and despair; the notion that they had done so much "wrong" didn't gibe with their self-image as type-A overachievers. For this sensitive lot, I found that a using more soothing blue or even a purple pen tended to help the tutoring process.
December 20, 2004, 8:19 am