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Grading essays and research papers can be the most trying part of any writing instructor's job. Fitting corrections, suggestions, and notes between double-spaced lines of text and into margins often creates a legibility problem, which only worsens when grading stacks of papers to meet deadlines. This essay describes electronic grading, a method that can ease the burden of grading for writing instructors, simplify checking online sources, and help prevent plagiaristic recycling of student work.

The article presents information on the method of electronic grading (e-grading) used by the author to grade essays and research papers. The author used the Protect Document feature of the Word software by Microsoft Corp. to grade an essay sent by a student. He found this grading technique far less time-consuming than either the color-coded method or hand grading. He explained e-grading to students and invited them to submit their works as e-mail attachments. In the Protect Document feature, any additions to the text will be in red and underlined; the deleted text will appear to the right in a deleted-text bubble. In the most recent version of the Word software, deletions are tracked in the bubbles to the right, and dotted lines point to deletion locations. E-grading offers tracking benefits as electronically submitted assignments can be kept on a CD, which proves invaluable if the data gets lost.