A Prank Turned Teaching Tool

When I was in college, I remember making a couple misspellings that Microsoft Word's auto-correct would never catch. Someone told me that you could add those misspellings to Word's Proofing Options and then it would catch it. When I looked at it, the mischievous side of me thought, "hey, I could do this on a friend's computer and have a word like 'the' replaced with a word like 'stupid' or 'butt face'... that would be hilarious!" 

Well, long story short, I never had the guts to actually mess with someone like this, but when I became a teacher, I started grading papers digitally and found myself writing the same statements over and over again, despite the fact that each of the students' writing was quite different from one another. I then remembered my idea for a prank and thought I could use it for good!

Here is a picture to give you an idea of how this works. First you open MS Word and click on the icon in the upper left of the window. Then, you click on Word Options at the bottom.

Once you're there, you can go to Proofing, which will open up the following menu (see below).

You want to click on AutoCorrect options, and that will give you a menu like the picture below. If you select a paragraph of text beforehand, then it will automatically populate the field as seen below. For example, I wanted to be able to say: 

In wh-clauses, do not invert the subject and the auxiliary:
Correct: "I didn't know what I should do."
Incorrect: "I didn't know what should I do."

So I typed that into a comment box, selected the text, then went to Word Options --> Proofing --> AutoCorrect Options. I then typed in that I want MS Word to replace "whc" with this paragraph (the code you select doesn't matter, as long as you can remember it--I chose whc for wh-clause). You can see this below:

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Anyway, I've found this helps me make digital comments faster if I am grading a set of essays that have the same errors. The best part is that this is entirely customizable, so you can easily remember the codes since you are the one making them, however, since you might be forgetful (like me), then you can create a cheat sheet like this in an another file:

It's funny when I think back to the first time I started grading digitally. It was actually from two reasons: first, the frustration that came from handwriting the exact same statement was too annoying for me, and second, when I would grade revisions, it was difficult to see exactly what the student had changed (if anything--sometimes one additional sentence or a font change would make it hard to follow my previous comments and see if they were taken into account in the revision). Making the comments digitally made it easier to track changes.

Every semester I learn something new about grading digitally, and I'm always looking forward to any new ideas you may be using. Feel free to leave a comment below.

Have a good one, and good luck out there!

-Bill