At this level, I'm supposed to write in blood!

So, a convo I had quite a while ago popped into my head for some unforseen reason (which, happens frequently, actually) and the topic has always amused me. When I was in grad school, there was this large debate on whether or not teachers/professors (and yes, there's a difference...not in the waste managment vs trash collector sense, but a difference nonetheless) should use red ink to grade their students' papers. I found it amusing because I had never thought of it as necessarily a negative before. I assumed people (like myself) used red because it was the most obvious..in the "look at me NOW!!" sense, not because in any way shape or form it resembled the blood of their students or of themselves. The debate mostly centered on the idea that using red ink somehow seemed more critical or judgmental (which, is kind of the point of editing actually) and that students feared reading comments in red more than they did in blue, black, etc. I, on the other hand, never noticed a difference in comments or context whether they were written in red or purple. There's even this whole movement to remove the use of the red-pen-of-death from elementary schools...I guess because they'll scar the kids or whatever. I find the psychology of this fascinating. I'd like to do a study (don't worry, it's not like Tuskeegee) where you take two students of roughly the same learning capacity/education/social upbringing and grade two sets of papers from each writing virtually the same comments for their papers using red ink for one student and black for the other and see if they actually feel different about the comments in connection to their color.