I regularly teach English composition to freshman students. They're required to submit several written assignments per semester. The length of the assignments is less of an issue than the sheer volume of them. I'll occasionally have 26~28 students in one section and will need to provide feedback and grades for as many as five assigments per term. This can be a heavy chore if the grammar is wobbly and the paragraph form is, well, inspired by something other than logic.

To direct traffic and manage the grading, I have my students submit their writing as an online text assignment in Moodle. They can either copy and paste from a wordprocessor (which, admittedly, often yields breathtakingly bad formatting) or type it directly into the form.

Once an assignment is submitted, I allow my students two feedback sessions before I assign a final grade. The feedback is quite simple, really. I underline anything that is awkward, incorrect or missing (I place underscores where words should appear and strike-through any unnecessary elements). If there is something wrong regarding paragraph form, like lack of indentation or punctuation, I'll point this out as well. When the feedback has been submitted, Moodle sends out a message telling the student that their assigment has been viewed, which often leads to a steady flow of students coming back to their writing.

The underlined errors provide enough information to help students focus their attention. In most cases, they are able to track down the mistake and make the correction. Having this sort of non-invasive guidance has been very beneficial to my students, and they often point out this feedback as being the most useful part of the course. What's more, they are put in the position of doing the work, rather than having their teacher explain their errors specifically. This encourages self-correction and raises individual confidence.

There are restrictions to my system, however. The writing must be submitted or revised more than 24 hours before the deadline in order to receive feedback. Also, if a student receives feedback and ignores it, he/she is heavily penalized.

It's a quick way to help students with their writing without getting bogged down in grammar lessons. In addition, the system encourages students to revise twice before submitting for a final grade, which actually keeps them on task longer than a single-submission grading system would.

It's win-win.