Making Comments Count

In Across the Drafts, Sommers articulates a clear perspective of feedback as an opportunity for students and instructors to interact in a partnership that promotes writing development. So often, comments are construed as teachers/professors expressing minor problems in grammar and form instead of overall composition. They neglect to understand that students who receive lackluster comments miss out on chances to learn from their mistakes so that they won't repeat them.

Comments on papers in a university setting may be the only outlet for writing instruction that some students receive. As a creative writing minor/future tutor, I realized while reading this excerpt that the writing-intensive instruction I receive is rare and not all students are lucky enough to have access to one-on-one or peer-driven writing workshops. In these settings, people don't typically point out simple mistakes, but rather overall issues in composition. I learn from the critiques because they occur in an exchange, not a simple relay of problems.

Successful comments must be specific. Check marks and drawn out lines don't do the writing or the student justice. It is hard to walk away from an essay with these kinds of corrections on them and learn anything of value. Who would say, "next time, I won't use that sentence" or "next time, I won't make my sentences so long so that I don't have any run-ons" or "next time, I'll capitalize that." This kind of feedback does not carry over across disciplines of knowledge. True feedback offers a perspective of your audience. An attentive reader shares feedback that has continuity for future writing endeavors.

Quality feedback teaches meaningful lessons to budding writers. The more practice students have in writing, the more appropriate feedback they may receive. Over time, well-planned and constructive criticism paired with instruction will benefit students who are willing to accept and appreciate the commentary.

Holistic Scoring

While reading this chapter, I was invigorated to find a scoring method that involves student-driven evaluation. Instead of teachers alone deciding what makes quality writing, students are integral in laying out the requirements. While a lot of the discussion focuses on one, very specific method of rubric-creation, it is democratic and modern.

When instructors train students how to evaluate one another's writing, they will be better equipt to understand the downfalls and successes within their own writing. They are also held more responsible for their own learning overall. Holistic scoring is especially effective with writing workshops because students enjoy the control over their writing processes. The holistic approach also removes teachers from the domineering grade-giver title and moves him or her into a position of coach, leader, and resource provider.

While it wouldn't make sense to simply reinterate everything in the chapter, I'd like to emphasize some of the issues I found with this method. While it does promote classroom involvement with grading, it also seems like an easy 'opt out' choice for instructors who aren't all that interested in grading their students work. It seems lazy, in a way, to allow students to take over the teacher's obligations. As the instructor, they have the experience and background knowledge to grade appropriately.

In an ideal setting, students would be interested in administering fair, objective grades to one another. More realistically though, students would give grades based on friendships, interest in the topic, or the mood they are in that day. Teenagers are distractable, emotional, and often selfish- too much so to be all that interested in grading papers.

While the holistic approach is appropriate for giving students more in a lesson than paper-writing skills, it is based on ideal principles that an instructor may not be able to implement effectively.