After grading enough stacks of Go Ask Alice essays, most teachers start to notice the same handful of recurring problems appearing across student writing, regardless of overall class ability. Recognizing these patterns in advance allows a teacher to address them proactively during the unit rather than discovering them for the first time while grading final essays. This kind of preemptive instruction saves grading time and produces stronger student work, since students get the chance to correct these habits before they become embedded in a formal submission. Naming the mistakes explicitly to students also demystifies the grading process itself.

The single most common mistake is excessive plot summary disguised as analysis, where a student paragraph mostly retells what happened in a section of the diary with only a thin analytical claim attached at the beginning or end. This pattern often emerges because students genuinely find the plot compelling and want to share what happens, mistaking retelling for interpretation. Addressing this directly, by showing students a side by side comparison of a summary paragraph and an analytical paragraph covering the same content, tends to be more effective than simply telling students to "analyze more" without a concrete model.

A second frequent issue is overreliance on the novel's most dramatic or shocking moments as evidence, even when a quieter, earlier passage would actually support the student's argument more precisely. This happens because the dramatic scenes are simply more memorable, and students reach for what they recall most vividly rather than searching for the most relevant evidence. Encouraging students to keep a running log of quotes while reading, organized by potential theme, gives them a wider pool of evidence to draw from when it comes time to write, rather than relying only on memory of the novel's most sensational moments.

Weak Thesis Statements

Many student essays open with a thesis that is either too broad to be arguable, such as claiming the novel shows that drugs are bad, or too narrow to sustain a full essay, such as focusing on a single minor detail without connecting it to a larger claim. Teaching students to test their own thesis by asking whether a reasonable reader could disagree with it helps catch overly broad claims, since a thesis no one would dispute is rarely a strong analytical argument. A brief thesis workshop, where students trade drafts and try to identify the arguable core of each other's claims, often surfaces these problems faster than individual teacher conferences alone.

• Excessive summary standing in for genuine analytical argument
• Overreliance on the novel's most dramatic scenes at the expense of subtler evidence
• Thesis statements too broad or too narrow to sustain a full essay
• Quotes dropped into paragraphs without explanation of their significance
• Conclusions that simply restate the introduction instead of extending the argument

Unexplained Quotations

Students frequently drop a direct quote into a paragraph and move on without explaining what the quote actually demonstrates or how its specific language supports the argument being made. This creates a gap between evidence and claim that weakens the paragraph's overall persuasiveness, even when the quote itself is genuinely well chosen. Teaching a simple structure, introduce the quote, present the quote, then explain the quote in at least one full sentence, gives students a reliable habit to fall back on until integrating evidence smoothly becomes more natural. This structure can feel formulaic at first but tends to disappear as students internalize the underlying skill.

A related issue is quoting passages that are too long or too general, which dilutes the specific analytical point a shorter, more precise quote could make more effectively. Encouraging students to trim quotes down to the essential phrase or sentence that most directly supports their claim, rather than quoting an entire diary entry, sharpens both the evidence and the resulting analysis. This trimming skill also prepares students for later academic writing, where concise, precisely selected evidence is consistently valued over lengthy block quotes that do more of the interpretive work for the reader than the student's own writing does.

Conclusions That Simply Repeat the Introduction

Many students write a conclusion that essentially restates the thesis and main points in slightly different words, missing the opportunity to extend their argument or address its broader significance. Teaching students that a strong conclusion should answer the question "so what," meaning why does this argument matter beyond the essay itself, helps push conclusions toward genuine insight rather than repetition. For Go Ask Alice specifically, a strong conclusion might connect the narrator's experience to broader questions about how society understands addiction or adolescent mental health, giving the essay a sense of reach beyond its immediate textual analysis.

Modeling a strong conclusion explicitly, using a sample paragraph that clearly extends rather than repeats its introduction, helps students see the difference in practice rather than as an abstract instruction. Many students have simply never been taught this distinction and default to repetition because it feels safe and clearly connected to the rest of the essay. A short in class exercise asking students to write two different possible conclusions for the same essay, one that repeats and one that extends, often makes the distinction click in a way that direct instruction alone does not always achieve.

Using These Patterns to Streamline Grading

Once a teacher has identified these recurring patterns across a class or even across multiple years of teaching the novel, grading becomes noticeably more efficient, since many comments can be prepared in advance and adapted to the specific essay rather than composed entirely from scratch each time. This does not mean feedback becomes generic, but it does mean the teacher spends less time diagnosing the same handful of problems repeatedly and more time offering specific, essay by essay guidance on how to fix them. Building a small bank of feedback language tied to these common issues saves real time across a full class set.

Sharing this list of common mistakes with students before they draft, rather than only discovering them through grading feedback after the fact, shifts some of the revision work earlier in the writing process where it is more useful. Students who know in advance what pitfalls to watch for tend to self correct many of these issues during their own drafting and peer review, reducing the number of essays that need substantial revision after the first round of feedback. This proactive approach benefits both the quality of student writing and the overall efficiency of the grading process for the teacher.