Stop Writing Comments Nobody Reads

Let's name the thing first, because you already know it. You spend hours writing careful, thoughtful comments in the margins — and a good number of your students glance at the grade, register whether it went up or down, and never read a word you wrote. It's a quietly demoralising loop: the more effort you pour in, the less it seems to land.

Here's the reassuring part. That isn't a sign you're marking badly. It's a sign you're marking thoroughly in a way the system rewards but students don't use. The fix isn't to care less. It's to move your effort to the place it actually changes something.

Start with one uncomfortable question about your feedback: could the student do anything with it tomorrow? A comment like "develop this point further" or "good analysis" is true, kind, and completely inert — there's no action in it. Compare it to "add one sentence explaining why this evidence supports your point." One of those gets ignored. The other gets done, because it tells the student exactly what to pick up and where.

So write fewer comments, and make every one an instruction. Not a verdict on the work, a next move for the writer. Most pieces need one or two of these, not a page. A single specific, actionable line at the top — "your paragraphs are strong but they don't link; add a connecting sentence between each" — will do more than twelve margin notes the student skims and forgets.

Then separate the grade from the feedback, if you possibly can. When a mark and a comment arrive together, the mark wins every time — the student reads the number and stops. Hand back the feedback first and the grade a day later, or make them respond to the comment before they can see the mark. The moment they have to act on what you wrote instead of just receiving it, your marking stops being a monologue nobody hears and becomes something they use.

And here's where you can genuinely get your evening back: most feedback repeats. Across thirty scripts you are writing slight variations of the same five comments, because thirty students made overlapping versions of the same handful of mistakes. That is not work that needs your handwriting thirty times. This is exactly the kind of load aime is built to carry — spotting the common errors across a set, drafting the repeating feedback, and handing you a starting point to adjust — so the routine part is done for you and your actual attention goes to the two or three students whose work needs something only you would notice. Less of your night on the comments nobody reads; more of you on the ones that change a child's next draft.

None of this is about caring less than you do. It's the opposite. It's about refusing to spend your evenings on comments that were never going to be read, so the care you have goes where a student will actually feel it. Mark less. Say the one thing that moves them forward. Go home.