Quill Reading for Evidence activities are designed for students to use evidence from a passage to complete three sentences. Our feedback bot will guide students through revising their sentences to use strong evidence, accurate mechanics, and correct spelling. There are some responses that the feedback bot will not accept that we have outlined below.

While a piece of evidence may work for multiple conjunctions in one activity, our passages are designed so that the strongest evidence for each conjunction is always different. If students use the same evidence for the "but" and the "so" stems but that evidence is strongest for the "but" stem, Quill will push them to select a different piece of evidence for the "so" stem. We want to encourage students to find the strongest possible evidence for each conjunction and to give students the opportunity to use evidence from multiple parts of the passage.

Quill Reading for Evidence activities discourages plagiarism by giving students feedback when they've used ten or more consecutive words from the passage in their response. We selected ten or more consecutive words as the cutoff because some of the passages include specific or technical language that students may not be able to paraphrase, so in some instances using under ten consecutive words may be unavoidable. However, responses that use ten or more consecutive words can typically be partially or entirely paraphrased in the student's own words.

For example, this response uses twenty words in a row that come directly from the passage:

The tool may also give feedback on shorter phrases that are taken directly from the passage when those phrases can be easily paraphrased. For example, this response uses just nine words in a row from the passage, but it could be easily paraphrased into the student's own words:

Quill Evidence requires that students provide evidence-based responses. This requirement allows Quill to narrow down the variety of potential responses, making the feedback more effective. We've included a couple of example sessions in which students were asked to revise opinionated responses. You can expect that your students will see similar feedback if using opinionated language.

Responses using first-person pronouns are also not allowed. We discourage the use of opinionated responses using the following feedback:

We want to encourage students to use the conjunction "because" to show a relationship of cause using evidence from the text. Students who start a "because" response with "of" will be directed to instead start their response with a noun:

In the example above, the "because of" response focuses on the cause of desertification as opposed to the reason why farmers want to stop it. The feedback encourages them to look back at the reasons why farmers want to stop desertification.

When a student responds with a "so" response that has the sentiment of a "so that" response, they will receive feedback that encourages them to shift their focus and provide a consequence.

When a student responds with a "so that" response, they will receive feedback like this:

Students cannot include any profanity in their responses. If they do, they will receive the following feedback:

We discourage colloquial spellings of words like "gotta," "shoulda," "wanna," etc using spelling feedback:

Please feel free to send a message to the Quill team using the green message bubble on the bottom right corner of the screen or email us at support@quill.org.