Opus 40: A Resource for Grading Academic Writing

This book of all Michael Clay Thompson's research paper comments supplements his three-volume Advanced Academic Writing series and also acts as a unique stand-alone resource for grading student academic papers. The book is a sine qua non for grading academic papers, a resource as useful to seasoned teachers as to homeschoolers coping with the issues for the first time. For the past forty-plus years, Michael has graded student papers and has written detailed comments on them. He soon tired of writing the same comments for the same mistakes year after year and began to put his comments into an archive that he could draw upon as he needed. Eventually this archive became extensive and comprehensive. Opus 40 contains the archive of his comments, his approach to teaching students how to write formal papers, his approach to grading student papers, and his reflections on and explanations of the comments he has written about structure, grammar, format, punctuation, style, and more. The book makes accessible in one place all the comments that are in the Advanced Academic Writing books so that parents can use them when grading. Note: This is a second edition of this book. It has two significant changes from the first edition. First, it contains many comments that Michael has rewritten as a result of his online teaching. Second, it reflects the current MLA guidelines, which are substantially changed from those that were in existence when the first edition was written. As a result of those changes, the information in the first edition is now wrong, and no one should continue to use the first edition.

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