by Nicole Gallucci

“Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.” —Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft

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I never really received substantial feedback on writing assignments during the first three years of my undergraduate career. I labored over my writing, always striving for the perfect blend of words to convey the seemingly important thoughts and ideas sloshing around in my brain. Assuming that good grades accompanied by minimal feedback meant that my writing was indeed as brilliant as I thought it was, I fell into a false sense of intellectual security. This all changed when I began taking history classes. The comments I received on my first upper level history paper were, in short, soul crushing. The professor shattered my illusions with comments like “Seriously?” and “What does this even mean?” The most gut wrenching comment accompanied a section of the paper that I had felt particularly proud of. He responded to it by writing “no. . . just no” in the margin. With little explanation as to why I had done so poorly, I felt confused and, for the first time ever, really crappy about my writing. In a nutshell, the professor killed my darlings with little guidance as to how properly revive them.

 

I internalized a couple of mixed lessons from this experience with unhelpful feedback. First, I learned that I needed to pay more attention to my writing and be willing to revise or cut some of my darlings. Receiving nothing but negative feedback for an entire semester inspired me to work harder, and there is little doubt in my mind that I am a better writer for it. At the time, however, it did not occur to me that the connection I made between receiving negative comments and working harder was not something that could be applied to all people in all situations. Applying this lesson to undergraduate writing my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant proved disastrous.

My dual interests in graduate school and teaching stems from a genuine love of learning and an innate desire to help people. However, during my first semester as a graduate teaching assistant I figured out pretty quickly that brandishing my pen like a sword and utterly eviscerating student writing was probably the least helpful thing I could have done to inspire students to improve that particular skill set. In imitating the professor who negatively critiqued my own writing as an undergraduate student, I marked up writing assignments with comments that were just as harsh as the ones I had received. I also neglected to explain why my criticisms were so harsh. This bad behavior on my part came to an abrupt end after one particular comment brought a student to tears.

While the comment itself does not deserve to be memorialized in print, the feelings it elicited from both parties warrant consideration. I had never felt so needlessly cruel in my adult life. I decided then and there that I needed to put the pen down and listen. I set up a meeting with the student in which they described how they felt personally attacked for something they had actually spent a lot of time on. They also explained how the comments caused them to shut down rather than want to work harder. This dialogue caused me to seriously reassess my role as a teaching assistant and instructor—I needed to think of my grading pen less as a sword and more as a tool for instruction.

 

The Writing Intensive Program here at UGA has helped me to better articulate the lessons learned from being overly harsh and downright unhelpful when commenting on writing assignments early on in my graduate career. I feel genuinely lucky to be surrounded by individuals who share a real interest in helping students to improve their writing via constructive, helpful feedback. One of the most important things I have learned from being a part of WIP is that if we genuinely want students to improve, it is absolutely crucial to be able and willing to meet students where they are. We cannot assume that all students know how to write the kinds of papers that we want them to. The average undergraduate student is typically being pulled in different directions by different departments in terms of expectations for their work, and we need to be sensitive to that potential roadblock.

It is also important to realize that when students do not perform as well on writing assignments as we want and/or expect them to, we should not consider it to be a personal affront to our chosen profession. In short, it helps no one to be a jerk about student writing. It is much harder and, ultimately, more helpful and rewarding to actually take the time to assess what is going on in ineffective student writing and base your feedback on that. This fundamental shift in my approach towards commenting on student writing has not necessarily turned me into an “easier” grader. It has, however, taught me to constructively kill students’ darlings without crushing their little scribblers’ hearts.