Comments on substance:

• A check mark always means something I liked, something good.  It means something good even if it appears on the same line as something that's an error.
• "Good" means that I like what you wrote, even if the subject under discussion is unpleasant.  For example, I might write "good" next to:  "Burkina Faso is riven with tribal divisions, many of them ending in widespread slaughter."  It means that I approve of your noticing the tribal divisions as a cause of the slaughter;  it doesn't mean I like either the divisions or the slaughter!
• "X" always means something wrong, something I didn't like.
• A squiggly line (~~~~) means something debatable and/or something partly right.  I may or may not put a further comment indicating the nature of my concern;  come talk to me if you want to understand and/or pursue the issue.
• "½" means something right but not yet complete.  It doesn't mean "half credit".
• "?" always - except for the one exception below - means something I didn't understand, something unclear, or else something I believed was incorrect or poor usage.  The exception is where it means, "You should have put a question mark here instead of a period [or whatever was there originally]."
• "Rel?" means "The relevance of this material to your theme isn't clear."  I have found this to be the most common (and most damaging) error:  you confuse your reader, dilute your point, and waste your limited space.  It says to me that you don't really understand the country or the paper's purpose and that you're throwing everything at me in hopes that something strikes home.  This is obviously not a good belief for me to have!
• "Fingers" means, "In this passage I've marked, you're on to something good (e.g., in Pol 1500 a cleavage or quarrel) but have let it slip through your fingers.  You didn't notice how important it was and call the reader's attention to it.  You get some credit for simply presenting good information like this, but you could have gotten far more credit if you had shown me you knew the implications of what you were saying."
• "Wishy-washy"; "Don't overstate":  these are two poles of the same problem, to wit, incorrectly assessing and stating the degree of certainty.  Here are examples:
• Wishy-washy:  "Lappé & Collins [World Hunger:  Twelve Myths] tend to imply that hunger is bad."  This is wrong, because there is no question that L&C believe hunger is bad;  their whole book is predicated on it.  So where does the "tend to imply" come from?  I read it as saying, "I haven't read the text enough to say whether the authors think hunger might have some benefits, so I'll protect myself by saying they only 'tend to imply' this."
• Don't overstate:  "Lack of literacy is the biggest problem in the Third World."  Well, maybe.  And if the question was, "What is the biggest problem in the Third World?", then this answer would be appropriate (even if debatable).  But if the question only asks you to discuss literacy, there's no need to say how big a problem it is (let alone that it's the biggest problem).  The only thing you need to say is that it's a problem.  So why would anyone overstate the situation like that?  I read the overstatement as saying, "I have to impress Prof. Chilton with strong, dramatic statements so he won't notice how awful the rest of my work is."  Don't let this be you!
• "Unnecessary emphasis", as in the following (exaggerated) example:  "Internalized oppression is a huge, huge, huge problem in the Third World.  You're so right to ask us about this, Prof. Chilton, because it occurs all the time and has an enormous impact on society."  Please - just answer the question!  Unnecessary emphasis tells me that you don't really have an answer.  [And let me say here that use of the word "huge" is a virtually infallible indicator that something is going wrong in the student's writing — at least in my experience.  I don't know why this should be, but it is;  some linguist may want to explore this pattern.]

• Proofreading:  I will often put a comment at the end of the paper that you haven't proofread it.
  • First, there's the simple problem that your spelling checker can't tell that you're using the wrong word.  For example, the following sentence would look fine to it:  "Their r too weighs too get they're."  ("There are two ways to get there.")  Only proofreading will reveal that.
  • Second, there's the simple problem that you neglect to look at the text to see that ^{there's something} screwed up with the material you wrote.  The lack of proofreading says you didn't care about the paper and probably didn't do a very good job with other aspects of it.
• "Sp?" means that you misspelled something.  HINT:  If you're using a spelling checker, the two final things you should do with your paper is spell-check it, then proofread it.  If you find mistakes and/or change the text in any way, do both these steps again.  Remember that spelling checkers will overlook errors that match another word.
• "Ref?" means that it isn't clear what the word ("this", "it", "they", etc.) refers to.  "Nigeria and Togo are on the west coast of Africa.  It got its independence in 1960."
• "Non seq." (or an arrow drawn from one thing to the next with a question mark over it):  "Non seq." is short for the Latin phrase, "non sequitur" ( literally, "not in sequence"), meaning, "This does not follow logically from what you wrote just previously".  Non sequiturs generally appear where you have lumped several ideas together in the same paragraph, or have made too big a jump from one sentence to the next.  "Non seq." is a particularly bad comment to get, because when I can't tell what follows from what, I become convinced that you don't really understand the material.
• The elide mark looks like a circle with a little loop in its tail (impossible to show here).  It means that the thing in the circle or underlined should be elided (deleted;  removed).
• A diagonal slash ("/") through a character means that it should be lower case, not upper case.
• "Cap" means a problem with capitalization, usually that you have not capitalized something that should be capitalized.  I also sometimes put three underlines under the material that needs to be capitalized;  this is the standard editor's symbol.
• If you rotate the symbol "()" 90º (i.e., on its side), it means close up the two words.  They ought to be joined, so the space in between them shouldn't be there.  Example:  the symbol would be put between "stand" and "point" in the following sentence:  "From Rousseau's stand point, difference still permitted equality."  Notice that your spelling checker will not catch this mistake!
• "Frag." means that the text next to it is a sentence fragment, i.e., not a complete sentence.  One without a subject and/or verb, like this one.
• "Comma" means there's a problem with the commas:  either you put one in where it doesn't go, or you failed to put one in where it does.  Often I just circle the problem area and let you figure it out.
• "Parallelism" or "||" (two parallel lines) means that you gave different structures to two sentences, or parts of sentences, that ought to match.  This frequently happens with paired words like "either-or" or "not only - but also".
• RIGHT:  "He not only went to sleep but also fell off his chair."
• WRONG:  "He not only went to sleep, but he fell off his chair too."
• RIGHT:  "Rousseau was either a sexist or a fool."
• WRONG:  "Rousseau was either a sexist or he would be considered a fool."
• You can hear parallelism by listening to the same sentence stem with both endings;  both sentences should read well.  For example:
• RIGHT:  "He went to sleep" and "He fell off his chair."  Note these are both sensible sentences with similar structure.
• WRONG:  "He went to sleep" and "He he fell off his chair too."  Ouch!
• RIGHT:  "Rousseau was a sexist" and "Rousseau was a fool." Note these are both sensible sentences with similar structure.
• WRONG:  "Rousseau was a sexist" and "Rousseau he would be considered a fool".  Ouch!
• "Paragraph" or "¶" means that you have switched to a new topic and thus need to start a new paragraph here.  (See the similar comment, "Section", below.)
• "Passive" means that you used the passive form when the active would be better.  The active voice is always more interesting than (and can usually be made just as correct as) the passive voice.
• WORSE:  "The military have long been a strong force in Nigerian politics. The First Republic was toppled in a 1966 coup by them."  [Here the subject of the first sentence - the Nigerian military - confusingly disappears from the second sentence until the very end.]
• BETTER:  "The military have long been a strong force in Nigerian politics.  They toppled the First Republic in a 1966 coup."  [Here the subject of the first sentence is also the subject of the second sentence, so the reader just goes from the first sentence to the sentence without having to shift gears.]
• "Period" or, more likely, a circle with a dot in the center (usually at the end of a sentence):  this means that you need a period here.
• "Poss.";  "apostrophe";  "plural":  these mean either that you used an apostrophe where you shouldn't or that you failed to put one in where you should.
• "Punc." means there's some problem with the punctuation (usually other than those listed above).
• "Rep." stands for "repetitious".  It means that what you're saying here repeats something you said earlier, or that the phrase you're using is redundant.  An example of redundancy:  "The bad, evil devil Satan tempted me."
• "Run-on";  "c.s.";  "comma splice":  these mean that the text next to it is a run-on sentence or uses a comma instead of a period between complete sentences, this makes it into one long sentence instead of the separate sentences it properly is, you can see from this example what it sounds like, but sometimes the problem isn't poor punctuation but rather that the sentence jumps from topic to topic, just like authors do occasionally in short stories, which are a very difficult form of fiction to write, because you have to compress so much meaning into so short a space, an art at which the noted author Don Kurtz is very proficient.  Notice that in the previous, chaotic sentence our use of comma splices led us to start talking about commas and wind up talking about topics and then short stories and then Don Kurtz.
• "Section" or "§" means that you should start a new section at this point.
• "ww" means that you are using the wrong word.  Thus if you said, "Privatization was the hallmark of Margaret Thatcher's reign", I would mark "reign" as a wrong word, since it should be "rule" or "government". Monarchs reign; Prime Ministers rule or govern.
• "mw" stands for "missing word" - a proofreading problem.
• "number";  "#":  these mean that you have a plural subject with a singular verb, or vice versa.  "Fiji's government [singular subject], like many other governments, are [plural verb] trying to solve these problems."
• "tense" means that the tense of two related verbs are of different tenses: one is present tense and the other past tense, or one past and one future tense, etc.  "Fiji's government will experience [future tense] these problems, is [present tense] aware of these problems, and analyzed [past tense] them."
• "spec." or "specif."; "the"; "premature specificity":  these all mean that you refer to something which hasn't yet been defined or specified. "Russia's government is subject to many problems.  Ivanov's samizdat has opened the door to new disputes."  Who or what is Ivanov? - we haven't been introduced yet.  And what is a samizdat? - how can I understand this sentence until the term has been defined?
• The caret sign ("^" below the line of text);  the inverse caret sign ("v" above the line of text):  these mean "insert here the stuff shown above, below, or in the margin".  If there's nothing in any of these places, then it means "insert a space".
• The interchange mark looks like a rounded N (impossible to show here).  It means that two letters (or words, or phrases, etc.) should be interchanged.  For example, I would use the interchange mark to show that the "t" and "n" should be interchanged in the last word in this setnence.
• "Garbled":  this catch-all terms means that the errors were so numerous and intertwined that I can't specify any single one, and I might not even be able to understand what you meant.
• "www" means "For more information, see the relevant material on my web site." If you aren't sure what that material is or how to find it, ask or email me.
• "STET" means "Ignore the correction I made here;  I realized later that I'm wrong."  "STET" comes from the Latin word meaning, "Let it stand."

Particular Chilton gripes:

• "Which" vs. "that":  use "which" for nonrestrictive clauses, "that" for restrictive clauses.  Examples:
  • "The hammer, which had fallen on my toe, lay in the dust."  [We're only talking about one hammer, but we are given the extra information about it that it fell on my toe.]
  • "The hammer that had fallen on my toe lay in the dust."   [There were several hammers, but we're talking about one of them in particular, namely, the one that fell on my toe.]
• "Which" vs. "who":  people are referred to by "who", not "which".  "Professor Chilton, which had come to class late, hastily handed out the exam."  Sounds dreadful, doesn't it?
• "Due to the fact that":  substitute "Because", which means the same thing and has only one fifth as many words.

In an effort to be gender-neutral (I assume), people are starting to use the technically ungrammatical "they" instead of "he" or "she" and to use "their" instead of "his" or "hers", etc.:

Each individual student [singular] has their [plural] own assignment.

There are more grammatical ways of phrasing this while remaining gender-neutral:

Each individual student has h/her [or "his/her" or "his or her"] own assignment.

As a student, one has one's own assignment.

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