The Rainbow Review: 
An Online Customized Critique of Style and Content Using MSWord 2007

Karyn Hollis, PhD
Associate Professor
English Department
Villanova University
E-mail:  karyn.hollis@villanova.edu

Meeting student writers at their skill level is not an easy task, yet every writing instructor knows that the more individualized the teaching approach, the more likely it is to succeed.  Yet while we may recognize that each student presents his or her own set of skills and weaknesses, abilities and needs, tailoring our responses and methodologies to fit individuals seems a daunting task.  Furthermore, the kairos of every academic rhetorical situation, the context and moment when teaching and learning take place, also varies widely.  While inexperienced freshmen in First Year Composition (FYC) may call for gentle guidance and encouragement, other more advanced writers in a professional writing class may actually request a more extensive critique.  For their part, instructors rarely have time to respond to unique needs of students with varying abilities.   In trying to meet this challenge, I have used Instructional Technology, in its most familiar form, the word processor, to develop time saving techniques that can be tailored to the needs of individual students, and in particular, those advanced writers who often long for intensive feedback.

I want to stress this last point because I think the needs of advanced students have been neglected in the process approach to teaching writing. It has been my experience that such students often request copious feedback and careful criticism. They want to know if what they’ve written is clear, concise and engaging—or not. They don’t seem satisfied with general directives or questions to guide their revisions—and indeed, these types of responses may not help them progress as writers. Time and again, students have asked me for precise feedback, textual interventions and rewordings that show how their prose could be improved. In short, what they really want is a good editor.

Having majored in journalism and worked as a journalist before teaching writing, I have had the good fortune of diligent editors scrutinizing my copy, crossing out flab, clarifying vague sentences, making nouns and verbs more precise, getting rid of passive constructions and the like. I appreciated this gift of concentrated attention and would like to provide my students with this same careful editing. I realize that such extensive feedback may not be appropriate for every writer or every paper, but I think it especially beneficial for more skilled writers who may be more mature and sophisticated in their desire for critique. For them, there is no substitute for a through stylistic critique which shows rather than tells what is wrong with a phrase, a sentence, a paragraph. Again, I know that in my own case, no matter how many times I read “wordy” in the margins of my papers, I didn’t understand how to fix the problem until I saw a professor/editor actually reword my prose more concisely.

As a writing instructor, I’ve tried without success to find editing, commenting and evaluation software that was suitable to my editing aspirations, but none of it seemed to allow for in-text insertions. So over the years I’ve developed an easy to implement online process for increasing the amount of specific feedback on student papers. Students write their papers using Word, or any other word processing program, and send them to me as email attachments. I, in turn, evaluate their papers on the computer. Because I use the highlighting feature of Word and also the red font color of the Track Changes feature, my evaluations are quite colorful, hence the name, “Rainbow Review.”

I employ four techniques available in MSWord and most other word processing programs. The features I use, highlighting, track changes and Quick Parts, greatly increase the amount of specific commentary on student papers, and once the techniques are set up, simultaneously cut down on grading time. (By the way, it helps tired eyes reading lots of papers to set the magnifying feature at 150%.) The four components offered below may be used separately or in combination. They are progressively more specific and offer a deepening degree of critique. With basic writers, I might use only the first technique; for more advanced writers I can offer a complex and complete review of their prose by combining all four.

1. A Highlighting Critique – Uses color coded highlighting to indicate specific areas for revision

2. A Track Changes Response – Uses the Track Changes feature of Word to strikeout wordy phrasing or inappropriately used words and add bracketed intertextual comments

3. Quick Parts Comments for Intertextual Feedback -- A growing array of automated comments to insert frequently used comments, punctuation suggestions and the like into student texts in red (or your color choice) font

4. Quick Parts Box for End Comments and Grade -- A simple two row chart for end comments, a grade and a reminder to revise to confirm the grade

Highlighting Critique

I have a color coded highlighting system in which each color stands for a particular area in need of revision. The simple system provides students with a concentrated, non-directive evaluation. When I receive a student paper, I open it in Word 2007, making sure the highlighting feature is available in the Quick Access Toolbar (See Below). As I read through the paper, I highlight words, phrases, sentences or whole paragraphs, with colors, each illustrating a particular problem or strength. The highlighting rubric I give students for interpreting my review is seen below. It is created with a simple table in Word or FrontPage for web-based syllabi.

Rainbow Review Evaluation Key

From time to time, your assignments will be returned to you with color coded highlighting as a way of commenting on your writing.  Each highlighting color indicates a different area for your attention.  Use the highlighting as a guide when you revise your papers.
Examples of excellence in your writing will be highlighted too! (In Aqua)

Incidentally, the highlighting feature of Word is comprised of 15 different colors.  I’ve used only 12. Others could use all 15 and, of course, designate colors differently from the way I have.  An example from a student paper follows which illustrates my technique.  This short excerpt from a 250-word feature story was written for a journalism class.  Readers will notice that I’ve used gray highlighting to indicate wordiness, light green for incorrect word choice, red for an avoidable “to be” construction, pink to indicate awkward phrasing, and aqua to signal effective writing.  When students receive their reviewed papers, they are instructed to read the passage, think about the highlighting, then revise accordingly.  This level of feedback is useful for beginning writers and others who may not need a “full correction” response.

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Using Track Changes for Evaluating Student Texts

I must warn the reader that what follows may seem a bit tedious, but following my instructions carefully will save you hours of work in the long run.  While the Track Changes feature of Word has myriad functions, I do not find many of them useful in responding to student drafts.  They often add distracting clutter to the student text.  Therefore, I set up the Review options carefully.  First, I make sure that my comments and suggestions are inserted in the student text and are not placed in balloons in margins.  To do this, click on Review in the ribbon, then Balloons, then select Show All Revisions Inline

To change more Tracking Options, click on the Review menu in the Ribbon, then click Change Tracking Options in the drop down menu. 

It is important to limit Track Changes so that only the strikethrough and intertextual commenting features are operational.  I choose red for the font color.  As I said above, I find many of the tracking features such as comments in balloons and vertical bars in the margins redundant and visually confusing to students.  Here’s how I set up my Track Changes Options:

Finally, you need to make sure that the highlighting, strikeout, track changes and Quick Parts features appear in your Quick Access Toolbar bar for easy access.  To put them there, go to the down arrow at the end of the Quick Access Toolbar and select More Commands from the drop down menu.

In the Customize window, select All Commands:

Next select the items to put in the Quick Access Toolbar in the column on the left and click on Add to place them in the column on the right.  Click OK and they will be placed in the Quick Access Toolbar.  You may arrange the left to right order of items in the Toolbar using the up and down arrows on the right of the window on the right.

If I wish to strike out words or phrases in a student text, I select the text and click on the strikeout icon in the Quick Access Toolbar at the top of my Word window.  Here is the same student text with the Track Changes feature turned on, using the text insertion and strikeout features to provide additional feedback to the student:

Using Quick Parts to Insert Comments, Punctuation, Advice

Setting up Quick Parts text inserts for frequently used comments and corrections provides a very easy way to add more specificity to evaluations.  After adding the Quick Parts icon to the Quick Access Toolbar, merely click on a word in the Quick Parts Gallery to have a recommendation, punctuation mark, and the like, inserted where you left your cursor.  In the illustration below, you can see a screen shot of part of my Quick Parts Gallery.   I have 18 entries which are arranged alphabetically and can be found by scrolling up or down.  There is room for many more entries.

Here are some more examples from my Quick Parts Gallery below and the corresponding text they insert:

To be = Add energy and economy to your prose by avoiding too many "to be" verbs:  is, are, am, was, were, be, being, been

Beginnings = vary sentence beginnings to improve choppy style

Comma = [,]

Passive = Your style is very passive.  Read the material on the web page below, do the quiz at the bottom of the page and turn in to me.
http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/passive.htm

Repetitious = Avoid unconscious repetitions

Transition = Needs transition between sentences or paragraphs

Vague  = Avoid vague nouns or pronouns; use specific language

Wordy = Edit to eliminate wordiness.

To set up your Quick Parts Gallery, first, of course, you must decide on what type of advice you wish to include in your Quick Part insertable text and what you will name it.  Let’s say you want a Quick Part that will insert punctuation marks in a way to draw attention to their omission in a student text.  Take a look at the way commas and quotation marks are inserted in the same student paragraph:

Here are the steps I used to add the comma insert to the Quick Parts Gallery. First, type a bracketed comma like this, [,] in the student text where you want to insert it. (If you have the Track Changes icon selected in the Toolbar, the text will automatically be in red.) Then highlight the bracketed comma and select the Quick Parts icon in the Quick Access Toolbar; then Save Selection to Quick Part Gallery at the bottom of the window.

In the Create a New Building Block window that appears, fill in the spaces as indicated below, changing the Name to “Comma,” and specifying that the text be saved in Normal doc.

Since this macro will insert a comma in a student text, I’ll name it “Comma.”  Put the cursor inside the Macro name box, erase the default name, and type “Comma.”  Careful--do not click OK yet.  Be sure to select “Normal” in the Save In box. Then click OK.   From now on, when you want to place a comma in a student text, you’ve only to select the word Comma from the list in the Quick Parts Gallery.

Quick Parts for Grade and End Comments:

The last technique I will explain is the use of a Quick Parts command to create a two-celled table for final remarks to students and their grade.  The grade is followed by an automatic reminder to revise the paper according to my editing suggestions and return it to me within a week to confirm the grade.  The process for making this Quick Part parallels the one above except, of course, the part will be called “Grade.” The first step is to create a table with two rows.  The top row is for the personalized end comments.  The bottom row is for the grade and includes a reminder to revise.  When making this part, don’t put a grade in until after you’ve recorded it. Later, when you insert the table into other student texts, you’ll be able to put in a different grade for each paper.  See the completed example below: 

Using Macros

Finally, Macros can also be set up to insert text in Word 2007 and are easily accessed in the Quick Access Toolbar; however, the icon images are limited, and it can be hard to remember what they stand for.  At present, users are not able to create their own more obviously meaningful icons. For that reason, the only macro I have created and used so far is the smiley face which I insert after particularly good answers on quizzes and the like.  Here’s how to make it.

First be sure track changes is selected.  Then click on View in the Ribbon, select Macros and Record Macro.

You must change your font and its size.  Select Wingdings, 18 point and bold.  Type shift “j” on the keyboard.  The smiley face icon in red should appear: Now go back to the Quick Access Toolbar, View, Macro and select Stop Macro Recording.

One last procedural point, I convert each student’s marked up text to a .pdf file before I return it to them.  As I have indicated, the role of editor is one I want to perform for my students, especially my advanced writers; it is a role they seem to greatly appreciate.  Using these relatively easy to implement functions in Microsoft Word (which are also common to most word processing programs), I have found a way to increase the kind and quantity of feedback I can include in student texts without increasing the time I spend grading and evaluating.

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