Responding to Student Writing

							                           Responding to Student Writing
                                Compiled by Rob MacDougall
                                   Department of History
                                University of Western Ontario
                                     rmacdou@uwo.ca

What is the purpose of feedback?
Giving feedback on student writing is a kind of teaching, no less than lecturing or discussion
leading. Feedback should be given with a purpose. Ask yourself what your goals are in
giving feedback before you begin marking papers. The purpose of feedback on student
writing should not be to punish error or only to justify a grade. It may be to improve future
drafts or papers, or it may be to impart knowledge and understanding of course material.
(Note that while these may overlap, they are not the same thing.) Know why you are giving
feedback, and what you hope to achieve.

Be a coach, not a critic.
When we respond to student writing without an articulated purpose, our inclination is often
simply to justify the grade. We catalog every factual error, every faulty interpretation, every
grammatical misdemeanor, typo, or day late. Our students are left to assemble this laundry
list of mistakes into a general diagnosis of faults and somehow apply this to their future
work. This approach is inefficient for us and unhelpful for our students. It is more useful,
more efficient, and more pleasant to focus on making positive suggestions for concrete
actions that will improve the student’s future writing or their understanding of course
material.

Limit and prioritize your comments.
Do not try to mark or comment on every error. It doesn’t matter how much you write on a
paper, your students will only absorb and internalize a few points from your comments. A
comprehensive list of failures and successes is not manageable. Restrict your comments to
recurring patterns—representative strengths and weaknesses—and mark and discuss each
pattern only once or twice. Make two to four useful criticisms or suggestions, ranked in
order of priority. Don’t dilute them with digressions on subtopics or a swath of red ink. Say
less. (NB: This is harder than it sounds!)

Show respect for students and their work.
It is important to make positive comments on student writing. Students need to know what
works in their writing and what actions and strategies to repeat. Praise is important, but what
is even more important is respect. We show respect for student writing by reading it the
way we hope our own work will be read by advisors and colleagues. We show respect by
reading an entire paper before we begin marking substantive errors. We show respect by
really trying to understand and appreciate what the student was attempting to do or say. We
show respect by mirroring back the argument of a paper in our comments (“In this paper,
you argue X, Y, Z…”) and by engaging seriously with its ideas. Also: remember that writing
is an extremely egocentric activity. Students invest personal comments, or comments that
merely seem personal, with great significance. Comment on the paper and the actions the
student has taken in writing the paper, not the student.
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                                   Specific Suggestions

The preceding advice is intended primarily for graduate students who are beginning to grade
papers as Teaching Assistants. There are other things to consider in responding to student
writing, but some, involving course and assignment design, may be beyond the TA’s control.
It never hurts, however, to keep them in mind.

Assignment Design
There are good and bad writing assignments. You get what you ask for: Unfocused, inexact
writing assignments yield unfocused, inexact papers. The best assignments are closely tied to
the pedagogical goals of a course, and professors and TAs should be able to clearly articulate
those goals. It is important to set clear questions that students can answer in an analytic
fashion in the space they have, using the sources available to them. It often helps to attempt
to sketch an answer to a question before suggesting it to students as the basis for an essay.

Roles and Genres
It is also useful to articulate the rhetorical role the writer is to play in an assignment. Without
clear guidance, students will often take the role of a “quilter,” stitching together a paper from
several sources without really responding to the material, or that of a “soapbox debater,”
arguing some proposition based on personal opinion but without real evidence or
professional vocabulary. The most appropriate role is often that of a “professional-in-
training,” using the tools of the discipline, but we cannot assume that students already
understand what this entails.

Course Design
Writing is a process. Ideally, a course with writing assignments should engage that process.
One way one can do this is by allowing time for revision and offering feedback at several
stages of an assignment: on topic choices and tentative theses, on research progress, on
rough and final drafts.

Review
Students learn to write, at least in part, by reading. It can be very effective to have students
respond to each other’s texts, telling them what they like and dislike, what they find unclear,
confusing, unconvincing, and so on. It can also be very effective to ask students to evaluate
their own work, submitting a cover letter or self-evaluation form with their essays. Such a
form might ask: What do you think are the strengths and weaknesses of your essay? What
would you like to improve? What questions would you like answered in feedback? I have
often been struck by how well students already understand the weaknesses of their papers.

Plagiarism
Part of your job in grading papers is to guard against plagiarism. See the department’s
guidelines on how to spot plagiarism and what to do if it occurs.
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                                          My Process

NB: The opinions expressed here are not necessarily the opinions of the UWO History
Department. Everybody has his or her own way of responding to student writing; what
follows is simply a process that I know works well for me.

Put down your pen.
I try to read each essay, without making any marks, before I assign a grade or make
comments. If I must take notes, I do so on post-its or scrap paper—but I recommend taking
no notes until I have read the paper as a whole. I find I save little time by reading with pen
in hand—usually the opposite. When I read with pen in hand, it is very easy to get caught in
the minutiae of typos and grammar and little asides, and it is hard to engage the paper as a
whole. I want to address the big ideas of a paper, and to comment on broad patterns of
argument and style, not individual errors. And I can only expect three or four useful
comments on each piece of student work to be absorbed. So I put down my pen until I can
decide which comments are really worth making.

Be moderate in copy-editing or revising student work.
I also advise writing as little as possible in the margins of student papers. It is very difficult
to resist “fixing” student errors: inserting missing punctuation, noting spelling mistakes,
revising whole sentences. I try to do so in moderation. If the paper I am marking is a draft
that will be revised, I fear that students will “freeze” these segments of their paper, even if
their ideas change, because I have affirmed that they are “right.” They learn nothing from
typing in corrections I have made.

Grammar is not the only problem.
This is controversial, but I really believe it: grammar is not the main problem. Our students
are exposed to good English every day. If their grammar or style is a mess, they
probably don’t understand the assignment or what they are saying. Under cognitive
stress, skills that we may have mastered in other contexts fall apart. When we receive papers
filled with turgid jargon or incoherent sentence fragments, it is not necessarily true that our
students graduated from high school without “learning how to write.” Students who do not
know what to say or what a given discipline deems worth saying will not be able to control
their grammar or their style.

There are predictable patterns in novice writing. They include: clinging to the concrete (for
instance, mapping the language of the assignment into the opening of a paper, or closely
following the order of topics in an assigned text); saying things that insiders would leave
unsaid; engaging in summary rather than analysis; inappropriate imitations of jargon or other
features of professional style; the breakdown of style into slang or incoherence; mapping out
the author’s thinking process (“thinking out loud”); discovering a conclusion only at the end
of the paper. These are predictable and regular stages in mastering a field. They cannot be
beaten out of students with red ink. The cure for these is for students to understand their
own ideas, to know what they want to say and feel confident that it is worth saying. We
bring them to this point by engaging seriously with their ideas.
Responding to Student Writing                                                       Page 4 of 5


Use a standard template or pattern for written comments.
I find it useful to have a template or pattern for your written comments. Not only does it
speed up the process of responding to student work, it helps me to grade objectively and to
prioritize my suggestions based on the way thinking and writing really work. My pattern goes
like this:
     1. I thank the student for their paper, and restate the argument written on the page.
     2. I address the main thesis. Does the paper ask and answer an interesting or valuable
         historical question?
     3. If necessary, I address the paper’s strategy for answering that question. How is the
         paper organized? Is it purposeful, coherent, and complete?
     4. If necessary, I address the use of evidence. Is it accurate and adequate?
     5. If necessary, I address the style of the paper and its use of language. Is it
         comprehensible and appropriate?

Note that every step after the second is optional, but the order of the steps is not. This
organization reflects my own conviction that student writing must be addressed “from the
top down.” We begin by engaging the ideas of a paper and only then move on to matters of
structure, evidence, and finally style and grammar:

Thesis/Ideas      Structure/Organization    Evidence/Logic      Style/Language/Grammar

Grading rubrics.
It is easy to assume that students know what a good paper looks like. But the student paper
is a genre that students virtually never read. Many instructors find it useful to create and
distribute checklists or grading rubrics that describe the qualities of A, B, C, D, and E
papers. Instructors often find rubrics simplify the task of evaluation and make the process
more objective by setting priorities for judgment. Students find rubrics more informative
than stand-alone grades or comments. They help convey expectations and answer student
questions about the quality of their work without forcing the instructor to engage in self-
justification. Used repeatedly, rubrics build a student’s sense of what readers value.
Checklists should probably not be used mechanically, as a way of toting up points toward a
final score. A good rubric demonstrates the organic nature of writing—how each part
contributes to the whole.
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                                          Sources

None of the ideas herein are original to me. There is a large literature on writing pedagogy,
both practice-based and theoretical. I’ve had the good fortune to take part in a couple of
excellent workshops on writing across the curriculum at both the Expository Writing
Program and the Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning at Harvard University. And I
have been without scruple in reading and borrowing from materials on the subject from all
over. The sources that were most useful to me in compiling this handout include:

Covington, Michael A. “How to Write More Clearly, Think More Clearly, and Learn
    Complex Material More Easily.” University of Georgia. URL:
    http://www.ai.uga.edu/mc/WriteThinkLearn_files/frame.htm
Fulwiler, Toby and Arthur Young, eds. Writing Across the Disciplines: Research into Practice.
    Upper Montclair, N.J.: Boynton/Cook Publishers, 1986.
Kiefer, Kate. “An Introduction to Writing Across the Curriculum.” WAC Clearinghouse,
    Colorado State University. URL: http://wac.colostate.edu
Mallonee, Barbara C. and John R. Breihan, “Responding to Students’ Drafts:
    Interdisciplinary Consensus.” College Composition and Communication 36, no. 2 (May 1985):
    213-231.

And additional advice and materials from:

Derek Bok Center for Teaching and Learning, Harvard University.
Expository Writing Program, Harvard University.
University College Writing Workshop, University of Toronto.