Responding to Student Writing

Source: Moxley, Joseph M. "Responding to Student Writing: Goals, Methods, Alternatives." Freshmen English News 17, no. 2 (1989): 3 11. Copyright 1989 by Freshman English News. Reprinted with permission

RESPONDING TO STUDENT WRITING:
GOALS, METHODS, ALTERNATIVES

Joseph M. Moxley
University of South Florida

Thanks to substantial research about ways teachers respond to student writing and the effect of teachers' commentaries on writing improvement, composition teachers are well informed about evaluation procedures and goals. Below are some of the most important recommendations that have emerged from composition research:

• Provide "for native" as opposed to "summative" evaluations. In other words, our purpose is not to justify a grade or do what Mallone and Breihan call "character assassination." Instead, we need to decipher the writer's intentions and propose, when pertinent, several alternatives to realizing these intentions. Ultimately, our concern should be more with teaching a student to ask the critical questions that writers ask when revising than with the quality of any one particular manuscript.



• Require multiple drafting. According to over thirty years of research, students benefit from our responses to their writing only when we respond to several drafts. To transform grading papers into a learning process, we must allow students to revise their work in light of our criticism. Otherwise, they tend to ignore our commentaries, no matter how wise our responses may be. (Bamberg; Burton and Arnold; Buxton; Fellows; Marzano; Knoblauch and Brannon; Sommers).



• Place students in small groups and teach them to evaluate each other's work. Allowing students to evaluate each other's work in small groups promotes critical thinking and leads to the development of essential editorial skills. Peer reviews also help students to better understand the needs, interests and expectations of audiences other than the teacher. Discussing various topics and treatments helps students better understand assignments and alternatives, and shy students can ask questions that they might not other vise ask.



• Avoid "appropriating" students' texts and simplifying students' roles to that of army privates following orders.
  

  In other words, the teacher's proper role is not to tell the student explicitly what to do but rather to serve as a sounding board enabling the writer to see confusions in the text and encouraging the writer to explore alternatives that he or she may not have considered. The teacher's role is to attract a writer's attention to the relationship between intention and effect, enabling a recognition of discrepancies, but finally having decisions about alternative choices to the writer, not the teacher (Brannon and Knoblauch 162).

  
  

  Most composition scholars (such as Erika Lindemann and David Fuller) argue that we need to provide written commentaries that outline alternative ways to improve student writing.




• Play the role of the students' intended audience. By role playing our students' intended audiences, we teach that writers compose for an audience, instead of "performing for a verdict" (Elbow 225).



• Encourage students to view revision to be an opportunity to clarify and discover one's meaning. We must encourage students to perceive revision to be an inevitable and important aspect of composing, not punishment for not getting it right the first time (Murray).



• Avoid overburdening students with advice by identifying only one or two patterns of error at a time. We need to teach students that writing well means more than forming grammatically correct sentences. We can teach students that what they say is more important--or at least as important--as how they say it, if we primarily respond to the substance and significance of their topics.



• Praise positive attributes in each paper. Like everyone else, students respond to encouragement and positive reinforcement. When papers are smeared with red ink, even the hardiest ego can be slow to recover. Sam Dragga and Frances Zak have argued that we should provide solely positive responses, and the work of learning theorists supports the assumption that we are most inclined to learn more when we are rewarded for positive behaviors as opposed to being punished for negative behaviors. Indeed, some preliminary research has suggested that praiseworthy grading improves students' attitudes about writing and results in more writing on the students' part than traditional fault finding grading (Dragga; Zak).



• Avoid excessive abstract, formulaic textbook language, such as "edit for efficiency!"; "transition?"; "v/ag"; "p/ag"; etc. Students are not professional copy editors, and past research indicates that they don't appear to understand or respond to our abbreviations.



• Omit grades on individual papers. Grades often transform the effective coaching role of a teacher to that of a judge and gatekeeper. As an alternative to grading individual papers, we can have students keep a portfolio of papers, and select a few papers to grade at the end of each semester (Murray; Burkland and Grimm).Although well-intentioned and theoretically convincing, some of the above recommendations are difficult to put into practice. For example, in my experience teaching undergraduate writing courses, I have found that not providing grades can be incredibly stressful for students, and colleagues have reported similar results. As much as we may hope that students truly want to improve their writing, grades are their lives and without them--in the unfamiliar territory of an English classroom--a few students may become fearful, anxious about plunging grade point averages. And even though I wholeheartedly agree with being positive when responding to students' work, I believe we need to show students why some passages are weaker than others.