The Coolest Research Essay Trick! Save 5-10 minutes per paper!

It's 5:10 on the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend.  Thank God! That means we have 3.5 days left of teaching and 3 days of workshop. I have been grading today--I probably did 3 hours reading Eng. 9 research papers. They are fine for freshman papers. I've spent the afternoon reading about the evils of electric vehicles, the need to keep funding the space program, book banning (she's on the correct side), and ditching daylight savings time.  They take about 9 minutes each. HOWEVER, I am grateful for an idea I came up with a couple years ago that SHORTENS the time spent trying to figure out if their citations match up, if they even USED all the sources on the works cited, OR if they included extra sources they didn't include on the list.

THE TIME-SAVING IDEA....

Here is the key: HIGHLIGHTING!  If this is common practice, forgive me, but I SWEAR I came up with it on my own at least.

On their WORKS CITED list, they highlight each source in a different color (online). THEN, they locate the source within their essay and highlight it the same color. (The next source is in green, for example.)

On these freshman essays with 4 sources each, it's helpful; however, in a longer research paper with twice that many sources it is a huge time saver! 

Anyway, I love it. Otherwise it's like, whew, I'm done responding to another paper, but damn, now I have to play the matching sources game. It's especially irritating when they have one on the citation list that is NOT in their paper (I would look through the paper several times). It's one of the few things I have come up with that ACTUALLY saves me time!  Do it! 

If you figured this out years ago, you really SHOULD have written a blog entry about it!