Is there a way to grade a word before I am done writing it?

I really like the auto-advance feature *except* that it makes it a total pain to manually mark a word wrong. It is slow to go back to edit the word score and I often mistap and reveal a stroke (or the whole definition) of the next card.

Usually I just mark one of the characters wrong, but what's the point of keeping track of words and characters separately and then mucking about in this way? Also, sometimes grading a character as wrong only makes the word so-so, instead of wrong.

Double tapping should reveal the character, and automatically rate it as wrong. Then you can change the rating before proceeding.

I want to grade the word, not the character.

I get what you mean now. The word grading ought to be available upon double tapping, it is not:
http://imageshack.us/a/img22/9056/photo3me.png
http://imageshack.us/a/img62/4339/photo2yu.png

Dependable Skeleton, did you know that the way that the iOS app handles word- and character-level grading is smarter than on the web client, such that if you miss one character writing in a word and Skritter thinks you know the character much better than the word, it will not submit a review for the character, instead only submitting a wrong review for the word?

I find that this means I rarely have to meddle with character vs. word grading, because it does the right thing in almost all cases.

I have my auto-advance speed set to 0.3 seconds, and I find that if I do want to finish writing a character and then change the grading, I can write the last stroke and then touch the screen in any sort of non-tap fashion to cancel the auto-advance. Perhaps an easier way of doing this would be helpful; open to suggestions on that.

Nick, I didn't know that I could cancel the auto-advance in this way. This totally does the trick! Thanks!

Incidentally, my only issue with the word grading in the app is when a word is graded as so-so even though there is a character which I got totally wrong. However, I am totally fine manually re-grading things.

Out of curiosity, is there any indication to the user that the character score has not been recorded? I'm not saying there should be, I'm just curious if there is.

I'm not a fan of the auto advance, but often times I will update the grading before I finish the final character...

The character will show a slightly fainter shade of red/pink than one that has been submitted as wrong. I put this in so I could see it and debug it, but the idea is that the user should not ever have to notice or think about this behavior, which is why it's not more obvious.

Do you guys think that having the word grading appear on tap, even if it's not there yet, would have solved this problem for you, or did you not think to try that already?

I never noticed the colour difference before! It is very subtle and inconspicuous.

I think that it would be very natural for the word grading dot to appear when I double tap to reveal the character.

I'll add it to my list, although I don't know when I'll get to it.