This draft has committed an illegal operation - brain must be shut down.

There are times when I really struggle with what I can possibly say to help a student on a draft. Sometimes I can't even begin to connect with the cognitive processes involved... and usually it's not on the worst drafts, which generally have easily identifiable flaws. Usually it's on drafts that have a thesis statement... if a little muddled... and they've used their sources... if slightly out-of-context... and there's a structure to their arguments... if fuzzy... but there's something about their technically correct but obtuse language, their logical leaps, and their unrealistic applications that completely confounds everything I know about writing.

I can't connect to the cognitive processes going on - I might be able to imagine how the student could have thought it sort of made sense, but the problem is that the dysfunction isn't one of writing technique - it's one of thought, and they've followed their flawed thought processes so far on so many levels I can't even begin to chart a course back to sanity. It causes a visceral reaction, and I'm not speaking metaphorically, nor out of antipathy toward the students; I am actually nauseated by the feeling of my own cognitive dissonance when I run into such papers.

These are the drafts that take me upwards of an hour, an hour and a half, to grade. I try to address lack of clarity in their thesis, and yet there's a consistency to their lack of clarity that suggests it won't be fixed just by pointing it out. I start writing about how their argument isn't sufficiently organized, only to realize that there is an organization scheme, but it hurts my mind to contemplate it and trying to find where it goes wrong is like trying to follow a mobius strip of fallacies and uneven comparisons, most of which I don't even have a name for, and, even if I did, the student certainly doesn't. The paper is barely legible, not because of a host of spelling and grammatical errors, but because words are used in not quite the right way and the ideas aren't quite coherent. I can express my complaints, but not in a way that sounds at all nice, and if I tried to enumerate the ways it breaks down, I'd be writing a dissertation.

And yet, through it all, I can see how the student followed the assignment and how the argument has some level of logic, and I need to find a way to specifically justify the grade I'm giving, which usually turns out to be a C. But I can't shake the feeling that any constructive advice I could give will be just as unintelligible to the student as the student's work is to me. And if I can't figure out how to fix their problems, how are they going to figure it out from my commentary?

Maybe this is the sort of student who thrives on free-writing, I don't know. Perhaps these drafts are a sort of stream-of-consciousness writing. All I know is that my mind does not fit that mold. I'm sure my personality makes this worse for me than it generally is for other people. On some level, I think my mind so naturally seeks structure that I don't know how to teach it.

Dr. Lang advised me to find the one point where a draft breaks down and focus on that rather than try to address everything in a draft. That's helped me a lot, and I've started to whittle down my average grading time. But I still don't know what to do when I can't locate the problem, when the incoherence is so thoroughly developed and universally integrated into the writing.

This is what frightens me the most about becoming a composition teacher. How do I connect to students when their thought processes appear so fundamentally muddled? How do I get over this phobia of incoherence and actually help these students become more articulate? How do I even name this problem - and it is their problem or mine?