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By Max Clio

You, I imagine, have stuffed all those unclaimed student papers and test booklets away into files, whether circular or vertical. You have snapped your office door shut with a feeling of deep satisfaction and have never looked back. Now, lucky dog, you are wearing shades, lolling about on the veranda, with a decadent novel spread out on your lap. You rub sunscreen on your shoulders and sip from the mint julep at your side. It's summertime.

I -- picture this -- am here at my desk, back bent over a stack of senior research papers. Yes, I am still enduring spring term. The public mega-university where I teach in the Midwest has a calendar patterned on the life cycle of 19th-century farm boys. Never mind that the state long since passed through industrial boom to rust-belt declension: We teach into June.

Come September, harvest time, when the rest of academe is already busy again sending up chalk dust, I shall enjoy weeks of student-free bliss, nearly until October. I will putter around in my garden, eating Big Boys off the vine. I will harbor doubts that I could ever teach anywhere else.

Right now, though, I'd swap, in a flash. Birds twitter, pollen descends in billowing clouds, and grading season hits me hard. Plus, for reasons that escape me, this year I signed up for summer teaching. I'll be grading until August.

Ah, grading. Evaluating student papers, you may recall, was the subject of a column I wrote last November, "Grading on My Nerves." That jeremiad garnered more reader mail than anything I have ever written. Not just more than Max Clio ever received, mind you: more than I have ever received in response to anything I've ever written, period, under any name.

More than 80 responses filled my Yahoo folder. (It can be unsettling when your alter ego is a bigger draw than you.)

There were so many useful suggestions and thoughtful reflections that it seemed a waste to let them stagnate in my inbox. Here I pass along the most constructive ideas, in hopes that they might aid someone, somewhere, seeking to deal with the crisis of student writing.

We are not alone, those of us who assign essays and attempt to maintain intellectual standards. We are not alone, those of us who indulge in procrastination and get irritable when grading. We are legion. A number of readers reported out-of-body experiences in reading my grading column. They imagined that I was them, or they were me -- or their colleagues accused them of something along those lines.

Many English teachers expressed delight that a historian like me would require students to write. However, I can now attest that hunger for good writing exists far beyond the English seminar room, indeed miles away from the humanities -- as far away as colleges of nursing.

Even a professor of business chimed in: "I've been appalled by the administration's apparent lack of concern about business students who are graduating with no apparent ability to compose an e-mail without spelling errors, much less a cogent 10-page document."

Clearly, this is a culturewide problem, not just a burden of individual teachers, however much we may experience it as our own.

A good many instructors, it appears, came across my "Grading on My Nerves" on the Web while procrastinating from grading. From them I heard howls of lamentation about student research papers citing Cosmo as a serious reference, of plagiarism right and left, and of grade inflation and its many nightmares.

Most correspondents recognized that my frustration with bad writing grew out of hope that my students would someday write well, and realized that holding all students to high expectations is democratic in that it invites all to rise to the occasion. Others dressed me down for elitism; or mistook me for someone who would take glee in the fact that they regularly fail 40 to 50 percent of the students enrolled in their 300-level courses; or told me that mediocre baby-boomers on the American faculty are the real culprit to blame. (I, being borderline Gen X, will beg off.)

My remarks about being what students call a "tough" grader prompted a telling yarn.

"Early in my career," wrote a retired English professor from South Carolina, "my departmental chair took me aside and cautioned me about being too easy on my students; fast forward 20 years to another department chair taking me aside to caution me about being too hard -- you guessed it; I hadn't changed in either expectations or methodology, but the concepts of what constitute a quality higher education had undergone a seismic shift -- one whose consequences we must all live with for generations to come."

Another reader cautioned sagely that an inability to read, encouraged by the Internet and television, lies behind much the students' inability to write. I, in turn, wondered if I am capable of teaching university-level students to read. I even wondered how one would begin to go about doing so.

A great deal of advice poured in on the psychology of grading, including the following recommendations:

• Once you've figured out who the best students are, grade their papers first, for a morale boost.

• Grade the strongest students last, for a morale boost.

• Intersperse strong and weak students, one after the other, for a morale boost.

• Take up motorcycling or some other happy diversion.

• Keep a record of student inanities for humor's sake (from my own pile, I offer "pheasant uprising").

Included among the suggestions on grading, naturally, were a few offered tongue-in-cheek: "One of my colleagues suggested that we give everyone a B+; that way the A student will continue to strive for greater excellence and all the others will be thrilled at their progress."

Many teachers responded to my worries about the poor quality of student writing with practical pedagogical tips:

• Treat composition as a second language; approach the topic as if students are in a foreign land, and work through it slowly, step by step.

• Make students write two pages about every assigned reading, or a one-page paper for every class session.

• Require revision of every assignment, after you've evaluated it.

• Require students to staple a rough draft to every paper.

• Post all student essays on line, allowing classmates to read them, thus encouraging more careful work.

• Disclose grading rubrics to students. Some of these rubrics included elaborate formulas (deduct 10 points for comma splices) -- too elaborate for me, but perhaps viable for others.

• Don't try to correct the entire paper; that will just overwhelm and demoralize students. Instead pick a representative paragraph, circle grammatical and usage errors in it, and comment on general structural issues.

Some of these I'd tried out myself, but a number, I'll admit, had never occurred to me before. I may give one or two a whirl. Let me know if they work for you.

Finally, many readers suggested that institutional priorities are a major factor in student performance. Three despairing scholars bemoaned administrations at private colleges who care more about student retention (and the implied tuition dollars) than about supporting faculty members who hold firm to standards. "Be thankful that you at least have the ability to flunk your students," one wrote from a historically black college, "as this private dictatorship here does not allow us, or we head to the unemployment line."

Another reader suggested -- quite reasonably, in my opinion -- that reducing class size in composition classes would go a long way toward improving student writing. The University of Florida, one professor of medicine reports, has devised a policy requiring students to amass 25,000 points before graduation, with courses designated as 2,000, 4,000, or 6,000 points based upon the number of written words they require of students. This sounded quite good until his note went on to relay that many courses are conducted over the Internet, with enrollment averaging 800, and that graduate students and high-school teachers grade most of the papers.

To my mind, intensive involvement with a face-to-face instructor is the only way students will get the idea that writing is about communicating with other human beings. And does quantity equal quality? It is pretty easy to imagine a student skating by on 25,000 misspelled, ill-chosen words.

One high-school teacher took umbrage at my suggestion that high schools no longer prepare students to express ideas coherently. She pointed out that if university admissions policies required independent verification of students' basic writing abilities, as is now mandated in the new SAT and voluntary in the ACT, then high-school administrators, students, and parents would take the English language more seriously.

Last but not least, one respondent recommended that I deliver myself to the Educational Testing Service as a faculty consultant, because reading AP essays would help me learn their rigorous method of assessment. Doesn't that require an all-expense paid trip to Princeton? Maybe that's where you'll find me next summer. Enjoy that mint julep.