How shall the blogs be graded?

After thoroughly looking over a few of the AP World blogs, there are a few different ways I think the blog should be graded. First off, I believe it's everybody's own personal blog, so the posts should be casual, and not like a person is writing their college essay for each one. That being said, I also don't think that the blogs should be written in text talk, or like it only took a person 20 seconds to write down all their thoughts. So although I don't believe that grammar should be a huge judgement of the blogs, I believe if necessary bad grammar should be penalized.

Second, I never believe length should be the judgement of anything. For instance, in english class, asking a kid to write a five paragraph essay with at least 10 sentences to each paragraph is pointless. Much of that essay will be filled with gratuitous information or sentences, and it's just harder to write and grade. I believe that whatever assignment it is, the person should only write the information that will help them answer the question they are being asked, regardless of length.


When it comes to the grading system, I believe that a 3 is a well-written blog that is "comfortable" to read and answers all parts of the question or assignment being asked, with clean examples or proofs added into the blog; a two is a well constructed post that answers only a few parts of the question being asked in detail and does not do a very good job using examples or proofs; a 1 is for people who half-a** every part of their blog, barely answering the question and not using anything to help prove themselves; and finally zero's go to those individuals who don't post, or when they do post, they don't answer the question in any way whatsoever.

I personally think that assessing each other, though it may have benefits, is a bad idea. I would hate it if people read my history blog every day and then judged it heavily, and I believe that others find that to be a painful experience as well. If people just check in to see what others think about the question being asked, that would be ok, but if they're going to comment on every post, that can get intimidating. It's one thing when you're teacher checks in, because you're doing an assignment specifically for them, but peer judgement is inexplicably scary to confront.