Separate from content misunderstandings about Hobbes' specific arguments, students analyzing Leviathan tend to make a recognizable set of writing-craft mistakes that show up regardless of whether the underlying content is accurate, and these mistakes are worth addressing as their own category of feedback rather than lumping them in with philosophical content errors. Recognizing these patterns in advance speeds up grading considerably, since a teacher who knows what to look for can identify and name a recurring issue quickly rather than puzzling out from scratch why a particular paragraph feels weak, and the resulting feedback tends to be more precise as a result.

The most common craft mistake is excessive paraphrase disguised as analysis, where a student restates Hobbes' argument in their own words at length, sentence after sentence, without ever adding an interpretive claim of their own on top of the restatement. This pattern is especially tempting with Leviathan because the original prose is difficult enough that successfully paraphrasing it feels like a real accomplishment, and students sometimes mistake that accomplishment for the actual analytical task the essay was assigned to do. A quick diagnostic is checking whether a paragraph could be reduced to a single sentence beginning "Hobbes says" without losing any of the paragraph's actual content.

A second common mistake is quote-dropping, inserting a passage from Leviathan into an essay without adequately introducing it or explaining its significance afterward, leaving the reader to infer the connection between the quotation and the student's own argument. This is a general essay-writing weakness that becomes especially pronounced with Hobbes' text specifically, since the archaic prose style makes an unexplained quotation feel even more disconnected from the surrounding paragraph than a quotation from more contemporary source material typically would. Teaching students to sandwich every quotation between an introduction and an explanation of its relevance addresses this pattern directly.

Sentence-Level Patterns Worth Flagging

At the sentence level, students writing about Leviathan often unconsciously absorb some of Hobbes' seventeenth-century sentence rhythms, producing unusually long, clause-heavy sentences that mimic the source text's style without the same clarity or control that Hobbes, working within his own era's conventions, actually achieved. This tends to happen most with students who have spent significant time closely reading the primary text right before drafting their own essay, and while the imitation reflects genuine engagement with the source material, it usually hurts rather than helps a student's own analytical clarity, since modern academic prose generally favors shorter, more direct sentence structures.

• Excessive paraphrase without interpretive analysis, where a paragraph could be reduced to a single "Hobbes says" sentence
• Unexplained quotations dropped into the essay without introduction or discussion of their significance afterward
• Overly long, clause-heavy sentences that unconsciously imitate Hobbes' seventeenth-century prose style
• Vague pronoun references where it is unclear whether "he" refers to Hobbes, the sovereign, or a hypothetical individual
• Inconsistent verb tense, shifting between past tense historical narration and present tense philosophical argument without clear reason

The Pronoun Confusion Problem

A subtler but surprisingly common mistake specific to writing about Leviathan is vague pronoun reference, where a student's sentence uses "he" and it becomes genuinely unclear from context whether the pronoun refers to Hobbes the author, the sovereign as a political role, or a hypothetical individual living in the state of nature. This confusion arises because Hobbes' own text moves fluidly between these three referents, and students imitating that fluidity without his level of authorial control end up producing sentences that a careful reader has to reread several times to parse correctly, which undermines the clarity of an argument that may otherwise be conceptually sound.

Correcting this pattern is usually a simple mechanical fix once a student is made aware of it: replacing ambiguous pronouns with the specific noun they are meant to represent, "the sovereign" rather than "he," for instance, in any sentence where the referent could plausibly be read multiple ways. Flagging this issue explicitly and early in a unit, ideally through a quick in-class exercise on a shared sample paragraph, tends to reduce its frequency considerably in the final graded essays, since most students correct the habit readily once they see a concrete example of how the ambiguity actually confuses a reader.

Building Craft Feedback Into the Grading Process

Because these craft-level issues are distinct from content-level philosophical errors, they benefit from being addressed in feedback as a separate category, so a student does not conflate a note about sentence structure with a note about misunderstanding Hobbes' argument, which are genuinely different problems requiring different kinds of revision. Some teachers use a simple two-column feedback structure, content notes on one side and craft notes on the other, specifically to keep these categories visually distinct for students reading the returned essay, which helps prevent the more urgent content corrections from getting lost among a larger number of smaller sentence-level suggestions.

Tracking which craft-level mistakes recur most often across a full set of essays on Leviathan also gives a teacher useful information for planning the next unit, since a class that consistently struggles with quote integration benefits from a different mini-lesson than a class that consistently produces overly long, imitation-Hobbesian sentences. Treating these writing-craft patterns as teachable, predictable, and specific to this particular text, rather than as generic weaknesses to be addressed the same way regardless of subject matter, ultimately produces more targeted instruction and measurably cleaner student writing by the time the unit's major essay assignment comes due.