Every English teacher who teaches J.B. Priestley's An Inspector Calls knows the feeling of carrying thirty essays home. The play is short, but the writing it produces is dense: responsibility, class, generation gaps, dramatic structure and context all show up in the same answer. Marking that kind of essay properly takes time, and time is exactly what most teachers do not have.

The good news is that most of the delay comes from process, not from the essays themselves. Teachers reread the same paragraphs, rewrite the same comments and hunt for the same missing skills across dozens of scripts. Fix the process and the marking gets faster without the feedback getting thinner.

Speed also matters for learning. A student who gets an essay back three weeks after writing it has usually forgotten what they were arguing. Feedback that lands within a few days is far more likely to change the next attempt.

This post walks through a workflow built around the specific habits of An Inspector Calls essays. It covers how to read, what to comment on, and where technology can take repetitive work off your plate.

Mark by skill, not by script

Instead of reading each essay from top to bottom and commenting on everything, decide in advance which two or three skills this task is testing. For a question on Mr. Birling, that might be tracking how his views are undermined, choosing precise quotations, and linking to 1912 versus 1945. Anything outside those targets gets a light touch or nothing at all.

• Pick two or three marking targets before you open the first essay
• Read the first paragraph and the last paragraph together to check the argument holds
• Highlight one strong quotation and one weak one per essay rather than annotating every line
• Write one next step in a form the student can act on the same week
• Sort finished essays into rough grade piles before writing any longer comments

Build a bank of comments you actually reuse

You will write some version of "explore the effect of this word" dozens of times a term. Keep a document of the comments you use most, tied to the most common weaknesses in essays on this play. A student who writes "Priestley shows that the Birlings are selfish" and stops there needs a very predictable piece of guidance.

The trick is to keep the bank specific to the text. A generic comment about analysis is easy to ignore, while a note that points to Sheila's shift after the Inspector's questions gives the student something concrete to revisit.

Use a rubric that matches how the exam is marked

If your rubric mirrors the assessment objectives students will be marked on, you can score quickly and consistently. Each criterion should describe what a strong response looks like in plain language, not in exam-board jargon that students will not read. A clear rubric also lets you skip explaining the grade at length, because the reasoning is already on the page.

Rubric-based tools are useful here because they apply the same criteria to every script in the same way. That removes the drift that happens around essay number twenty, when tired marking starts to feel harsher or softer than it did at the start.

Let software handle the first pass

AI grading tools such as GraideMind can read an essay against your rubric and draft feedback on structure, use of evidence and analysis. That gives you a starting point rather than a blank comment box. You stay in charge of the final grade and can edit anything that does not sound like your class.

Used this way, the time you save goes to the parts of marking that need a human: spotting a student who has finally cracked the Inspector's role, or noticing one who is coasting. Faster grading is only worth it if the feedback that reaches students gets better, not just quicker.