Methods

T.A. Toolbar was initially designed to help instructors of online composition courses who grade many papers online. Almost immediately, however, it came into use in traditional face-to-face (F2F) classes as a way to provide the richest and fastest possible feedback to as many students as possible. Thus, even F2F students were asked to begin submitting papers as MS Word or Rich Text Format (.rtf) attachements to emails. The amount of paper that is saved by using T.A. Toolbar extensively adds up quickly. Do the math sometime and then pat yourself on the back, you green tree-hugger you!

It is possible to become a little trigger-happy with T.A. Toolbar and end up turning your critique of a student's essay into a war zone. But you don't have to mark everything, nor should you. Overuse of T.A. Toolbar can cause students to feel discouraged about their performance

, and it also means that you are spending too much time grading. (And you bought T.A. Toolbar to help you avoid that, right?) Just be clear with yourself about what you need to grade for any particular assignment and stick to the plan. You and your students will be happier and probably learn more in the long run. To help you avoid clicking too many times in a given essay, use The Overuse Warning Feature.

T.A. Toolbar comes with an automatic indexing system that will list all of the errors in the paper and the pages where they may be found. Such an index can help you get a snap-shot, overall sense of the number of common errors in a paper, which in turn helps you develop a grade. Students may find it helpful too, but in some cases they may view the index as a litany of their failures. Relatively advanced students may find the index helpful; students with less writing experience may find it humiliating. However, every student is unique, and you need to observe the moral of the story: index with discretion.

Fortunately, there are things to talk about besides common writing mistakes. T.A. Toolbar makes it easy for you to insert an ad hoc comment at any point that is already formatted like the other auto-comments, i.e., in bold, blue text within square brackets. (See The Custom Comment Button.)