The Intro: After 25 years of teaching high school English, during which time I attended numerous in-services and workshops on how to correct essays, I still did not have a foolproof method to objectively grade papers. (Every few years people who didn't teach English had a new philosophy on how to correct papers, but after instituting these novel approaches, my colleagues and I noticed the essays rarely seemed to get any better, and usually the opposite occurred.) I wanted to be able to put an 8