In 1955 the University of Wisconsin Press printed a 39 page pamphlet on evaluating first-year compositions, by Ednah Shepard Thomas of the English Department. Evaluating Student Themes proved popular and was reissued in 1966. Reproduced here is the cover—faded, soiled, and lightly repaired—of a copy of the 1957 second printing that I found in a second-hand bookstore in Fort Collins, Colorado.

Thomas prints 14 first-year student essays, of varying quality. Each has an extensive end-note, ostensibly to the student but really to teachers. Thomas calls the comments, some longer than the essay, “idealistic.” Her four-page forward seems remarkably contemporary. She says that the teacher’s aim in commenting is not to do the work for the student but “to stimulate and guide the student to assume responsibility for doing it.” The teacher should require corrections only for specific errors, with “general comments to be applied to the next assignment.” The teacher ought to “recognize strength as well as weakness.” “No student should be left without hope and no student should be left without challenge.” She notes that in the first-year writing program at Wisconsin, teachers provide “a grade report at stated intervals but no grade on individual themes.”

Ironically, Thomas’s warnings against correction of surface error (“The teacher does not edit”) were perhaps missed by the production department at the University Press. The design of the wrapper, front and back, is a typed theme infested with a swarm of stylized stick figures. The theme is one analyzed in the book, and the repeated stick figure seems to be a detective with Sherlock Holmes magnifying glass pointed at the text (take a look). The grammar police are not easy to exorcise. Perhaps the cover designer had not had Ednah Thomas for first-year composition but instead her colleague and much better known compositionist, Robert C. Pooley, whose Teaching English Grammar (Appleton-Century-Crofts) appeared the same year as my copy of Evaluating Student Themes.

RH, November 2003