Flexing flabby writing muscles

I tell my students all the time that failure to exercise their skills will lead to atrophy, and now I've become a prime example of that phenomenon. My first-year seminar students have been doing almost all of their writing assignments by hand in class this semester, which means my ability to decode student handwriting has developed to Olympic gold medal levels while my ability to write coherent comments on freshpersons' drafts has suffered. Now I'm facing an online dropbox full of drafts that need detailed responses, but just looking at them hurts my brain.

If I were teaching first-year composition, by this point in the semester I would have read and responded to at least four drafts by each student. In this seminar, on the other hand, writing assignments have been entirely handwritten, with no opportunity for revision, so my comments are brief and minimal. It takes far less thought to write a comment justifying a B- than it does to explain to a student how he can develop his evidence more thoroughly or write a more effective thesis or organize ideas so they make a compelling argument. And then I have to decide whether to insert suggestions about all those little niggling details, like comma usage and citation format and paragraph indentation.

In a perfect world, I would focus my efforts on the big-picture issues and rely on peer reviewers to pick up the niggling details, but how many first-year students can provide really useful feedback on their classmates' drafts? I see some students making good specific suggestions, but I also see the comments from the student whose mission in life seems to be forcing everyone to use Times New Roman. Frankly, I don't care which font students use as long as it's readable and consistent, and I have no idea what I might have said to make the Font Enforcer think his efforts are helpful.     

And here's further evidence of atrophying skills: If I'd been requiring students to engage in peer review all semester long, maybe they'd be better at it. A few are pretty good, but far too many think it's helpful to tell a classmate that his draft is fine when it doesn't fulfill the most basic requirements of the assignment.

So here's where my effort to discourage reliance on AI comes back to bite me: students who do most of their writing in class aren't accustomed to submitting essays online or providing useful suggestions on their classmates' drafts, and I'm struggling to come up with meaningful comments to insert in those tiny boxes in the margins. The brain cells balk, the words wither, the fingers fail to fly across the keyboard.

But I can't enjoy Thanksgiving break until I've responded to all these drafts, so here I sit trying to flex writing muscles that would prefer to continue their nice long nap. Nothing to do but to put one word in front of the other until some meaning coheres out of the haze. 

Wish me luck. It's going to be a very long day.