Help grading essays?

Wow! That is the age old lament of English teachers. Kudos to you for igning them and grading them critically. I didn't teach English but I did teach AP U.S. History and we did a lot of writing. One way I managed my work load was divide the cl into three groups and had one group doing essays every week. You are still doing a lot of reading but in smaller doses. I also used a system of checks, underlines and circles for evaluation. Checks were good, relevant points, circles were spelling errors and underlines were grammatical errors, I also used x's for incorrect historical data. The symbols don't matter, what I found was that it was easier to make these quick marks as I went along than stop land make a comment. Sometimes I would comment if it was necessary but a lot of the mundane could be handled with the marks. At the end I would make overall comments like spelling errors hurt your presentation or good use of historical data or whatever. You could have the kids look at the errors and make their own corrections or perhaps this would be a time to use groups (I don't personally like using students to evaluate other students' work, most of the time they do not have the expertise or the maturity to do it correctly) However if you have noted the errors they could "team" up to correct the errors. The problem is that you would have to look at those to see if they are correct. Good Luck