Frequently the abbreviated comments English teachers place in the margins of student papers come into question. While teachers know tortured English when they read it, they may be equally tortured to explain it. Thus we have come up with “awk,” “wdy,””dang,” “wc,” the dreaded “more,” not to mention the all-purpose “???” It takes more than a style guide to decipher many of these.
In the interests of full disclosure, not to mention clarity, I offer this space for recording and trying to make sense of the cryptic symbols of teacher comments. For those who think, “Who cares?” or “Self-explanatory,” read no further. These plaintive appeals are not meant for you.
But for those willing to concede that all parties want to understand or be understood, this is a place to go beyond “awk.”

To start I will do just that.

“Awk” is the least understood abbreviation of the marginalia, because usually the writer of the comment understands barely more than the reader. The writer of the comment feels the potholes on the surface of the sentence, but to point out where or what they are takes more words than the original writing of the sentence. Teachers who compose comments as long as the sentences they refer to are teachers who slump over stacks of papers late at night. So rather than explicating the sentence at hand or rewriting it in articulate prose, the teacher writes “awk,” meaning “awkward.” “Awk” (as opposed to “coordinated” or “articulate”) means the language gargles, rather than sings. It is usually about the construction of the sentence, an error of style.

My colleague Craig Dionne says the comment means something you could explain better face-to-face than in a short marginal note. An articulate comment and not at all awkward, Craig! The comment might be communicated with time or perhaps by pointing or perhaps by mouthing the words in awkward fashion, but none of this can be communicated in the margins of an essay.

I invite readers to give their own examples of “awk” and why it either makes no sense or what it was intended to point out. Respond to this post with your own examples or complaints around the topic of “awk” or even other abbreviations of comparable obscurity. If you have the actual phrase in the composition that received the comment, feel free to quote it, so we can admire the extent of the failure of the commentary.

Let us go where no person has gone before . . . beyond “awk.”

(Unless someone offers another specimen of obscure teacher comments, I will resume with “wdy” in May).