Module 5: Responding to Your Students’ Writing
You asked for it, and you got it: a stack of papers marking the culmination of your exploration of a discipline specific issue, leading each student to choose a topic, then plan, draft, revise, and edit the artifact that has landed (metaphorically, at least) on your desk.
Now what?
This module assumes that this is not the first set of papers you’ve ever graded—that you have felt the weight of all those papers, all those things you wish had gone differently for each student, the dismay of seeing the same error over and over even though you had covered it in class. It assumes, too, that you know how to set standards of the sort established in our first module and assess a paper in light of them.
But perhaps this is the first time you have taught a course that focuses on learning to write. If that is the case, it is important to consider how your responses can be an important part of writing instruction. It is in this light that we examine two approaches to commenting on papers, followed by a set of specific practices you can use with either approach.
1. Two General Approaches
The traditional approach to evaluating and commenting on a student paper is to make it the end point of the student’s writing process. The assignment began it, and the grading ends it. The comments on a graded paper can have the whiff of an autopsy about them—a sloppy intro that never got better, weak evidence left unaddressed, errors that were not caught. If you plan to comment extensively on a final draft, at least frame your final comment in a way that looks forward to the next paper:
- Celebrate a few positive features, and maybe even suggest ways to make these features stronger in the next paper. Tell them to “do these things again!”
- When commenting on the weaknesses, suggest how to improve on the next assignment.
By encouraging readers to treat your responses as recommendations for improving the next paper, your comments will likely have more impact. But if you wish to have the most impact, comment extensively on the next-to-last draft. Students will be more attuned to your assessments and recommendations if they can do something about them. If you do this, comment very lightly, if at all, on the final draft.
This approach is more time-consuming, and it also requires a very quick turn-around on the whole set so that students to respond to feedback before getting too far into the next assignment cycle. For these reasons, most professors shy away from it. Still, by commenting on a rough draft, you can coach with more hope for improvement, and students will take them more seriously in that spirit of hope.
There is a variation that combines the two approaches in which a professor comments extensively on the final draft, and then offers the class an opportunity to revise for a better grade—either an average of the first and second drafts, or the full score on the better attempt. This too can be time-consuming, but most students will not exercise the option to rewrite.
2. Specific Practices
Let’s begin by recognizing the two worst ways to respond to a students’ draft—to say nothing at all, and to say too much. Most everyone in academe has the experience of pouring all one had into your paper, only to see it come back with a few light corrections; a few one-word comments; a grade; and a final “Good job.”
It’s also likely that you have encountered a paper so poorly constructed and edited that you spent more time commenting on it than the student did in writing it. You carpet-bombed the pages with corrections, remarks on style, marginalia about the flimsy generalizations, circles around whole paragraphs and arrows to another place where the paragraph might logically belong. You then feel vindicated (but exhausted) in giving the paper a D, while the student sees so much “red ink” that they have no idea what to focus on the next time they write. By following the practices described below, you can avoid both extremes.
2.1 Read First, Comment Second
We rarely read student writing the same way we read anything else. When have you ever graded a journal article, proofread a summertime novel, or wrote “needs evidence” in the margins of a Washington Post column? Consider, therefore, giving yourself five minutes or so to read a student’s draft rapidly, just to see what the whole piece is doing. By temporarily adopting a more natural perspective, you can better “hear” the writer’s voice
and see how the whole argument hangs together (or not) before getting caught up in technical judgments.
Another benefit of developing a global perspective on the paper is that you will see patterns more clearly. This will allow you to comment purposefully, focusing more on a few things the student is doing well and a few things that the student needs to work on. Without this more holistic view, it’s more likely you’ll waste energy feeling the pressure to comment on everything, making it harder for students to see what their priorities should be for the next draft or writing project.
2.2 Catch them Doing Things Well
When your chore is to evaluate a paper, it is easy to ignore a basic truth about it—that it has more sentences that are grammatically correct than wrong, more words that are well chosen than imprecise, more points backed up with evidence than not. When you experience a moment in which a student is doing something particularly well, give a specific piece of praise:
- This is a strong sentence in the way it uses an introductory phrase that connects with the sentence before it. Do this more!
- Your analysis ties together your citation and your main point. Well done!
- By using the word “narrative” in the last sentence of the previous paragraph and “story” in the first sentence of this one, you guide the reader and create a strong sense of flow.
The importance of offering bits of praise should be obvious, since humans, like most animals, tend to respond better to reward than to punishment. But it’s especially important in writing instruction because students are so conditioned into focusing on problems and seeing writing as exercises in error avoidance. By catching them doing things well, we do more to show them what good academic writing looks than when we point out what it is not.
At the same time, do not strain too hard to find things that are praiseworthy, and do not misread this advice as asking you to be “soft.” In fact, you will be most helpful when you can provide some balanced coaching, pointing out something going well in connection with something that’s going poorly. If, for instance, one paragraph struggles to have focus and shape, call it, but then compare it to a paragraph which succeeds in those areas.
2.3. Dealing with Errors
By correcting every mistake that we see in a student’s paper, are we really doing them a service? Some say “yes—how else are they going to learn?” And indeed, the more conscientious students will scrutinize your corrections—might even question a few—and will keep them in mind on their next effort.
Other writing instructors question the wisdom of the “professor-as-copy editor” approach to commenting on papers. Most students, they claim, will move on without taking such comments seriously (though you can make them take it seriously by withholding a final grade until they correct all the little things). More importantly, they claim that a scattershot correcting of errors gives students little to no awareness of how or why their writing is wrong or how to correct what you have done for them.
Here are some alternatives to the traditional “mark-each-of-the-thousand-little-things” approach to a paper:
- Focus on pattern by commenting only on a regularly occurring problem. If they make a few comma-splice errors per page, comment only on those, and help them see what’s wrong, and why. Set priorities, because not every error is equal.
- Edit and proofread only a paragraph or two to illustrate the work they had left undone. Challenge them to learn from that selection, ask questions about marks they don’t understand, and apply the instruction to the rest of the paper. You may even want to assign each student to correct the paragraph and resubmit as a low- stakes writing assignment.
- Rather than correct the error, ask a question to create inquiry. “There are two apostrophe errors in this sentence. Circle them and show me how to correct them.” If they can, that’s great. They’re learning. If they can’t, and they ask for guidance, then you have the opportunity to be a teacher rather than a frustrated editor.
2.4 Respond from A Readerly Point of View
Students coming out of high school often see themselves as writing for the teacher, and many of us reinforce that perception by making comments such as “I don’t understand this sentence,” or “I’m confused here,” or “I like this point.” There’s nothing wrong with this if your assignment does indeed ask them to write to you, but consider opening them up to audience awareness by responding this way:
- “Your sentence correctly uses this term, but the assignment is asking you to introduce the issue to an undecided public. How can you get them to understand what might look like jargon?”;
- “The jump between sentences A and B might confuse readers”;
- “Readers will likely think you introduce this point in a witty, readable way.”
This strategy may appear disingenuous, since it is always the “I” who reads and judges. But if you have created assignments that give students a RAFT (see Module 3), you have likely asked them to write in a specific context that does not always imply a “college professor” audience. Being the “voice” of that audience suggests to them a more sophisticated way of seeing their papers. Instead of producing writing to be “corrected” by a teacher, they may begin to see their papers as an attempt to communicate meaningfully with readers. Such comments also shed light on the principles of effective writing rather than on judgments that can be misinterpreted as personal preferences of the professor.
2.5. Tie Responses to the Criteria on Your Rubric
Sometimes we can get so preoccupied by the particulars of a paper that we forget we have grading criteria connected to your rubrics or, more broadly, to course outcomes. Focusing your responses on themes like “thesis” or “evidence,” or “style and editing” can remind student and professor alike that the writing instruction is focused and purposeful. So, consider comments like the following: “Thesis: you have a clear, arguable contention and indicated good reasons for holding that view—good work!”; “Evidence: while this generalization may hold, readers might be more willing to go along if you had some backing for it”; “Organization: perhaps this background would work better as your second paragraph?”; “Concision: can you see how the four words I highlighted could be expressed by one word?”
2.6 Close the Loop on Writing Instruction in an Assignment Cycle
This practice is like tying responses to the criteria in a rubric. If, for instance, you spent a session on paragraph focus, identify a paragraph that has good focus and one that could still use some work. Such comments reinforce the connections between instruction and its application—connections which can get lost in the shuffle of the thousand little decisions that go into writing an essay.