Revising or correcting

From the Professor T episode “Ring of Fire” (first aired September 3, 2023). Cambridge professor of criminology Jasper Tempest (Ben Miller), who’s already assisted the police on a season’s worth of cases, has wandered into the station — he was in the neighborhood, he explains. Detective Sergeant Dan Winters (Barney White) wonders if the professor is at loose ends and looking for something to do.

Professor T: On the contrary, a long and tedious task awaits me.

D.S. Winters: Hmm, and a stack of essays to revise.

Professor T: You do not revise essays, Detective Sergeant; you correct them. To revise something is to improve it. As in, “He needed to improve his use of language.”

Oof. I would say read or grade essays, not correct . You read student writing to evaluate it, strong points and weak points, what ideas have merit, what’s not as persuasive, what improved from last time, what the student should think about for revision or the next piece of writing. And you make corrections along the way — agreement, punctuation, reference, even spelling, dammit, all the things that make student writing student writing. But nobody wants just to be corrected.

Our household stumbled upon this series by chance. It’s wonderful, and it’s all available at pbs.org. And as I just discovered, the series is adapted from a Belgian series, Professor T. , also at PBS. There are French and German adaptations too.

A related post
At the Continental Paper Grading Company

[The British show: no period after T .]