A partial list of phrases I would like bound to a macro key, to save myself typing them over and over again as I mark up student lab reports (not all of these apply to the current crop of students):
- Not only were you able to [verb] the [noun], you did [verb] the [noun]. Say that directly.
- You are describing an experiment that you did a week ago. That makes it a little odd to talk about what you “hope to find” in your report.
- Do not talk about the educational purpose of the lab. Pretend that you did this experiment on your own, because you wanted to learn something, and not because I made you do it for class.
- The preceding block of text contains many different ideas all jumbled together. It should be broken into at least two shorter paragraphs, each dealing with a single main idea.
- Please think carefully about how to organize your writing to provide a clear and logical flow from one idea to the next.
- Please proofread your work carefully. Just because Word has not flagged something as a misspelling does not mean that it is the right word.
- “Utilized” is an abomination. “Used” is a perfectly good word.
- “Human Error” is not an acceptable source of uncertainty. When you attribute uncertainty to human error, you are saying “Our results disagree with the accepted values because we did the experiment wrong.” If you did the experiment wrong, you should re-do the experiment, not write it up and hand it in.
- It is very interesting to read that you used data analysis programs and techniques that were used in past versions of this experiment, but not the version we did in this class.
What am I forgetting?