Professor Szalay's
Composition Editing Key
Upper Division German - Advanced Courses

Vocabulary
  v  -  poor choice / does not fit or inappropriate; literal translation from the English
v/o  - missing or unnecessary item; check logic of construction
v/lx - wrong gender of noun; wrong plural of noun
un  -  unmöglich! No such word or construction exists in German; includes the use of English words where German versions should be used, e.g., Ich studierte im Library.

Spelling/Punctuation
 sp  -  misspelling; capitalization error
  p  -  punctuation error; umlaut error; missing or unecessary punctuation

Morphology / Kasus (verb conjugation, case endings, articles)
m/o -  missing article or unecessary use of article; missing ending on plural dative, genitive masc./neuter, n-nouns
m/c -  case error (e.g.: wrong or missing ending on article or secondary word / adjective)
m/v -  incorrect subject / verb agreement (person or number)
m/p - verb particles: incorrect or missing separable prefix or past participle
m/aux - wrong auxillary for verb construction (haben; sein; werden for future or passive)
m/ifl  -  wrong verb stem form (strong vs. weak); if noun, wrong inflection for the comparative / superlative forms (umlauts or verbs stems)
n-a-g - noun-adjective-agreement faulty in some way, e.g., Meiner guter Vater.

Syntax / Satzbau (word order and verbal constructions)
s/o  -  missing or unnecessary element (preposition, conjunction, pronoun, subject)
s/v  -  incorrect placement of verb or verb particles (participles, prefixes); check for: inverted word order; subordinate clauses; SVO - subject - verb - object in main clause, infinitives with zu vs. modals; incorrect placement of verb particles
s/adv -  incorrect ordering of adverbial elements (time, manner, place)
s/n  -  incorrect or illogical placement of nicht / kein

Coherence
c   -  illogical: tense inconsistency: pronoun inconsistency; indicative instead of subjunctive; or other non-sequitur resulting in comprehension problem
c/p -  poor organization of thoughts from one sentence or paragraph to another

Style
st  -  overly simplistic: need for compound / complex sentences and / or elaboration of content
X  -  one or more words are missing and must be inserted (exception: reflexive pronouns)
+   -  Any particularly nice (even elegant) touch for which there may be extra points awarded
//   -  Double lines through a word indicate that it is not necessary and must be deleted
?   -  A question mark adjacent to a word, clause or sentence that is underlined indicates that the reviewer could make no sense of the passage whatsover. The entire work needs to be rethought, and a native speaker consulted.