The Ballad of the Red Pen

By Matt Reed. How do you use the red pen? As a student, especially in K-12, the red pen was the authority indicating error. There, I learned that you measured the quality of writing by the number of errors it contained. The upside of that method was that it forced me to learn my grammar. The downside was that it tended to reward a certain predictability. (Five paragraphs, topic sentences...) In college, the red pen came very late, when it came at all. It tended to be more cryptic than in high school, sometimes to good effect and sometimes not.  But I had grown to fear it less. In grad school, the red pen was mostly used to indicate ideological objections, as opposed to “errors” in the sense that most people use the term. Read more...