by Taylor Heid, Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources
When you sit down to write, do you get a flash of sweat and racing thoughts? Well, same, and chances are we are not alone. While some may have social anxiety when public speaking, similarly, when I sit down to write, I stumble across my words and my mind goes blank. An empty page is such a daunting sight—how am I going to fill it?!
I believe this stems from how we have been trained and given feedback from our previous experiences. The red marks across my essay and vague comments, like “awkward” or “this doesn’t make sense” don’t tell me anything constructive on how to improve, but instead tell me I failed.
Now I am a Writing Intensive Program (WIP) TA, and I am in a position where I have to give feedback to my students. I don’t want them to go down the same road I have experienced, and, instead, I want to encourage them to continue to write by telling them what to improve on but also highlighting what their strengths are.
In writing pedagogy, we are taught the compliment sandwich technique. This sounds exactly like what it is. This technique says you should sandwich a critique between two compliments:
First, you should compliment your student: “This is a great topic sentence!”
Next, you can give them some feedback: “This sentence feels out of place and maybe would be better elsewhere or omitted.”
Last, give another compliment: “Awesome job using descriptive words! It really paints a picture in my mind.”
The feedback should also be constructive. Students can only learn a few things at a time, so it is best to keep your main takeaways limited. I personally like to summarize what I think the student’s key takeaways should be from my feedback at the end of their essay in a little summary. This helps give our students direction, particularly ones who have writing anxiety. From personal experience, when I get a paper back with a ton of comments and feedback, I feel overwhelmed and don’t even know where to start. So, let’s give our students something to work off. I like to number the takeaways and make them bigger picture items so that they provide some direction to give the overall paper a lift. An example might look like this:
- Keep your narrative consistent throughout your paper. You do a good job telling a personal story at the beginning, but then that point is lost later in the paper. Weave the theme throughout!
- Remember the purpose of your paper and relate every paragraph back to it. During revision think, “does this help support my argument/purpose?” If not, then it can go!
As TAs or instructors, it is our duty to not just guide our students but to also get down to their level. Try to remember how you felt when you were a freshman writing your first essay and not really understanding the expectations. We are here to relieve anxiety, not cause it, and we can do so by providing constructive and to-the-point feedback with some compliments sprinkled in.
