Isn’t it funny that the teachers who complain the most about the abbreviated text and creative punctuation of students’ IM and e-mails are the same ones that invented such epigrammatic marginalia when grading papers? Social Studies and English Teachers of the age of paper would cover essays in red proofreading marks and other personalized acronyms to explain to students where they chose a poor word (PWC) or wrote an incomplete (inc) sentence.
My personal favorite is the underutilized RTOL (Read This Out Loud). I’m sure that when students read their papers out loud, or hear them read out loud, they would hear most of the grammatical mistakes. The odd phrases and failed attempts to sound academic would stand out like a bad case of acne. My theory is that their minds correct the writing mistakes as they silently read their essays, they can’t see them. When it is read out loud however, they cannot avoid them.
Enter scribd. It is essentially a file storage system for documents. But it also has a audio function that will read your documents out loud. A crisp British accept almost masks a slightly clunky reading style that at least recognizes punctuation and therefore does a decent job of reading your document back to you.
So whatever the function of scribd, my students will use it for proofreading. Perhaps also they can experiment with putting their notes on their iPods.