THE PAGE

I really enjoyed Elbow's conversation about the page. I think about page space a lot, doing research on History of the Book: size of the page, number of blank pages, advertizements, white space, margins, marginalia, text size/quality. I am just now beginning to think of the page in terms of composition. My previous experience grading student papers was through Texas Tech's First Year Writing Interface-- where students submitted their writing electronically to a pool which graders then work from without a student name attached. The "rich text" was lost with this interface. I became accustomed to grading without tabs for the beginning of paragraphs or all of the underline/bold/italics that we use for our MLA citations. This semester, grading hard-copy papers had made me a formatting nazi. For some reason it is SO distracting not to get those perfect, 12 point Times New Roman font, 1" margin papers. What is wrong with students?! And I think that reading Elbow made me realize why this frustrates me so much: it keeps me from getting to the actual writing that the students are doing. The change in formatting from one paper to another is distracting. It isn't that it does/doesn't meet MLA standards, its that for each paper I have to re-adjust myself. And, since I grade student papers with a timer, that takes away from the comments that I have time to give them.

I don't want to feel incapable of changing from formatting requirements, but what other options are there that wont be distracting during the grading process?