Few features of Their Eyes Were Watching God spark as much student curiosity as the way the characters talk. Hurston, trained as an anthropologist, rendered the speech of Eatonville and the Everglades with care, and readers still argue about how to interpret those choices. For English teachers, essays on this topic raise two grading questions at once.

The first is about the analysis itself. Does the student explain what dialect accomplishes, or simply say that it makes the characters feel realistic? The second is about the student's own writing: when a student quotes dialect, or when their own voice reflects a home language, what should count as an error?

Getting either question wrong has consequences. A rubric that lumps everything under "language" can quietly penalize students for the very thing they are being asked to discuss. It can also hide the difference between careless writing and a deliberate stylistic choice.

The approach below keeps the two questions separate. It gives you clear criteria for the analysis and a fair, consistent way to handle conventions. Both make feedback easier to write.

Grading the analysis of dialect

Look for essays that connect speech to meaning. Strong papers might argue that the porch conversations give the community a shared authority, or that the contrast between the characters' speech and the narrator's more lyrical prose creates a tension the novel never fully resolves. Weak papers describe the dialect as "hard to read" or "authentic" and stop.

• Does the student describe specific features of the speech, such as rhythm, humor, or word choice?
• Is the dialect tied to character, community, or power?
• Does the essay consider the narrator's standard English as a contrast?
• Are quoted lines copied accurately, including spelling and punctuation?
• Does the student recognize that critics have read Hurston's dialect in different ways?

Treating student language with care

Students who speak a home dialect or are multilingual are learning to move between registers, and academic writing is one of those registers. Feedback should teach the convention without implying that the student's own speech is deficient. A comment such as "In formal analysis, use the standard form here" is more useful than a red mark and a deduction.

Weight conventions appropriately. If a paper's argument is sound, a few surface errors should not drag the grade down more than a rubric row allows. Decide the proportion before you read, not while you are looking at a specific paper.

Critical debate as a source of evidence

Some college and advanced high school courses ask students to engage with critics. Hurston's contemporaries disagreed about her approach to dialect, with some feeling it flattened her characters and others seeing it as a celebration of Black speech and folk culture. A student who can position their own reading within that conversation is doing more sophisticated work.

If students cite critics, grade the integration of the source as you would any other evidence. Does it support the student's claim, or is it dropped in as an ornament? Check that quotations and paraphrases are attributed properly.

Keeping feedback consistent

Language topics invite subjective grading, which makes consistency more important. Write your standard for each rubric row on a card and read it before each batch. If you use an AI grading tool like GraideMind, make sure the rubric states what counts as analysis and what counts as conventions, so the feedback follows your priorities rather than a generic idea of good writing.

Review any flagged language issues by hand. Judgments about a student's language are sensitive, and they deserve a human reader who understands the classroom context. That extra look protects both fairness and trust.