We [should] comment on student writing because we believe that it is necessary for us to offer assistance to student writers when they are in the process of composing a text, rather than after the text has been completed. Comments create the motive for doing something different in the next draft; thoughtful comments create the motive for revising. Without comments from their teachers or from their peers, student writers will revise in consistently narrow and predictable ways. Without comments from readers, students assume that their writing has communicated their meaning and perceive no need for revising the substance of their text.
Nancy Sommers
Effective Feedback Attributes
1. Appropriate for the type and stage of the writing.
Focus on global strategies in early stages to help students focus on big-picture concerns in revision.
Save sentence-level concerns (e.g., grammar and word choice) until right before final submission when students are polishing their work.
Help students identify goals for each part of the writing process.
2. Focused on teaching the field’s conventions.
Help students understand specific conventions and expectations related to writing in your field
3. Positive.
Use praise to point out what is working in drafts and encourage students to revise and invest in their writing.
4. Limited.
Highlight 1-5 issues depending on length, type, and stage of project.
5. Global.
Help students understand that the revision of ideas and prose begins with larger, more complex considerations.
The “Correcting” Conundrum
Over-concern with error in student writing “unintentionally reinforces error.”
—Donald Murray
- Line-editing is an inefficient use of faculty time and expertise.
- Over-marking student work reinforces the idea that surface-errors are what writing is about.
- Marking everything that could be addressed in a piece of student writing confuses and overwhelms students.
- Responding to a paper’s development and organizing issues requires more than red pen corrections.
- Limit critical feedback to a few prioritized concerns, preferably composed as an end note.
- Marginal shorthand like “AWK” does not help students improve their writing or writing process.
Feedback Strategies
- Less is More. Provide fewer, but more focused comments.
- Encourage revision as re-seeing.
- Resist the urge to edit.
- Remember goals of the course and the assignment.
- Focus on global concerns to get students to think deeply about their writing.
- Use feedforward to help students see connections across assignments.
- Assign reflective writing to encourage response to feedback.
- Schedule conferences to discuss feedback/progress one-on-one.
If you are going to make a comment, make it well. Rather than spray the paper with various notes and abbreviations, take your time, select what areas of writing are most important for this student, at this time, and write out more fully each of the comments you do make. Try to cast your comments in ways that will engage and inform students, in terms that will connect your comments to the larger conversation of the class. Try to give them the kind of comments they will be interested in reading and working with. Response to a large extent is nothing more—and nothing less—than interpersonal communication, a matter of talking respectfully with someone else.
—Richard Straub