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Pittsburg State University
1701 South Broadway
Pittsburg KS 66762

Don Judd
WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4697

Kathleen De Grave
Assistant WAC Coordinator
English
Phone: (620) 235-4705

Cynthia Woodburn
Assistant WAC Coordinator
Mathematics
Phone: (620) 235-4490

Bruce Shields
WAC Graduate Assistant
English
Phone: (620) 235-4686

How should I respond to student writing?

Giving good writing assignments isn't enough to elicit the kind of writing you want from your students, because writing well is a skill your students have to learn over time. The most important thing you can do is give useful feedback to your students once the papers come in. See below for suggestions on ways to give responses that will move your students forward in learning to articulate course concepts.

Be a Coach

Many faculty believe that their job in responding to student writing is to justify the grade -- the student earned a C because . . . . However, in a Writing to Learn course, justifying the grade on daily work is less important than commenting on the student's progress. Our purpose as WL faculty is to help students learn the course content through writing about it, and in the process become better writers and thinkers. A good way to accomplish this purpose is to let our students know that writing is a process, and if they are willing to put in the work they can make their writing better. The comments on a student's papers should show this kind of guidance: they should tell the student what was good about the ideas and the form and suggest ways to make the next version or the next exercise better. The comments should run throughout the student's paper, in the margin -- such as questions about content and logic and noting where the student does well. Then, at the end, should be a longer response that brings the marginal comments together and points ahead to possible changes the student could make. Remember always to find what the student is doing well first -- in the margins tell the student when something is good or especially intriguing; at the end, refer to those parts of the paper that are the best. Just as a coach has to keep his or her players' confidence and morale up, while pointing out the players' weaknesses, we as WL faculty should try to bolster our students' sense of what they are good at, even as we explain what our students still have to work on. See How do WL Faculty Motivate Their Students and How Can I Improve my Students' Writing for more on these ideas.

Less is More

Try to mark only what is most important to you in the given assignment. Learning the course content comes first, so deal with your students' understanding of key concepts and their ability to use evidence to back up their assertions before worrying about surface errors. A student will quickly be overwhelmed by too much information if you try to note every misspelling and mechanical error, as well as commenting on ideas and logic. Typically, students will choose the easier route, and concentrate on the grammar errors, merely editing their papers rather than truly rethinking them and writing a revision, presuming they are given that option. If the student has serious mechanical problems, alert the student to that fact in a general statement ("too many misspellings," or "fix the sentence fragments") and suggest that he or she use the Writing Center for help. Thinking about ideas, evidence, and logical connections is much harder. Your job is to help with that more difficult writing problem (and move the student forward in the course at the same time).

Know What You Want

If you have clearly established for yourself the kind of writing you are looking for in any assignment, it will be much easier to know how to respond to student writing (and to let the students in on the secret). If you are looking for original thought or an application of course concepts to new situations, then you will know how to respond to rote answers and summaries. If, on the other hand, you want students to summarize an article well and relate the ideas to concepts you've been dealing with in class, then you will know how to respond if a student goes off on a tangent and seems not to have read the article at all. Likewise, knowing ahead of time how formal the writing should be, and what tone the student should take, will help you explain the problem when a student falls short. (And will help you praise that portion of a student's paper if it is good, even if other troubles arise.) If you can write out your expectations in the assignment itself, that would be best. See General WL Writing Assignments for more on this topic.

Use Peer Review

In a Writing to Learn class, students should write more than you read (because when you read a piece of writing, you should give it some thought and comment -- not just give a check mark or token points). Still, any time students write there should be some kind of feedback, although it doesn't have to come from you. Students can respond to one another's writing. Here are two ways this can happen:

Students exchange short writes

In class, you will often find an opportunity to have students write an on-the-spot response to issues that have come up -- perhaps writing a short definition of a term or taking sides in an intellectual argument (see short writes for more ideas) Sometimes you will want to pick these spontaneous writings up, in order to see how well students are understanding the concepts you are teaching, but much of the time the writing can better serve as an impetus to class discussion. Have your students exchange their responses -- two by two is best -- and talk about the differences in their points of view on the subject. Those multiple mini-discussions can then be brought into an overall class dialogue. In some cases, you could ask if anyone has seen a response that seemed especially good. The reader or writer could read the short write to the class (presuming the writer says okay), giving the rest of the students a model.

Students look at rough drafts

As a writer yourself, you know that anytime you do serious writing (such as a journal article) you give a draft to someone you trust to help you see the gaps you missed and to see if the logic and style are strong. Your students need the same opportunity. When you assign a formal paper, your students will need to revise and later edit what they wrote. Talking to you in a personal conference and getting your comments on the rough draft will help a lot. But before that happens, your students could benefit from seeing what their peers say. In groups of no more than four (so that there isn't a "fifth wheel"), have your students look at one another's essays, one at a time. If you have been having your students exchange short writes regularly, they should already have built up some trust. And if your students know that their purpose is to help everyone succeed (that this isn't a competition), then the peer discussions should be fruitful.

Peer review takes some class time. It might be best if you can schedule one day as "rough draft day" right into your syllabus (or one day for each major formal writing assignment). With four students in a group, at ten minutes per person, the groups should be able to look at all four essays in a fifty minute time period.

Emphasize that as the students look at one another's work, they should give constructive criticism: no negative language allowed, but thoughtful suggestions for ways the writer can make the essay better. The group should think of itself as a team, trying to help everyone be as effective as possible.

Here are some rules that should make the peer review a success:

Have the students bring their rough draft and at least one other copy of it to class on rough draft day.
Separate the class into groups of three or four (two gives only one response rather than a group response to an essay), in some logical way. (See small group work for ideas on how to do this.)
If you want your students to look at certain parts of the essay -- thesis, vocabulary, evidence, logic, examples, tone -- give them those instructions, either on the board or in a handout. Avoid having them edit for mechanical errors -- too much time will be spent on this and not enough on the more difficult areas that need revision at this stage.
In each group, the writer should read his or her copy of the draft aloud while the others share the other copy to read along. Often writers will hear their own mistakes if they read their sentences aloud. Students will sometimes try to speed up the process by sharing the essays silently, reading all three essays in a row. The problem with this is that then the group is not focused on one essay at a time.
The writer should then listen to what everyone else has to say about the essay; the writer should not talk or argue back, even if the writer thinks the group is wrong. (The writer should take into consideration what his audience thinks he or she has said, and make changes as needed. This is part of the revising process: clarification.)
You could ask your student writers to write on the back of their drafts the suggestions that the group gives and state what revisions they intend to make.
You should be the time keeper, helping groups keep on the time schedule.
At the end of class, you can pick up the rough drafts or you can ask your students to make a revision based on the peer review before turning a draft (or final version) in.

Allowing peer review puts the learning process squarely in the students' hands. Research by some composition specialists have shown that students learn more from seeing what other members of the group have done (both mistakes and successes) than they do from the actual discussion of their own work, and that the experience of being a constructive critic of someone else's draft builds confidence and expertise in looking at their own writing.

For an excellent further discussion of how to handle peer review, go to http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/processes/peerreview/index.cfm (Colorado State Univ) and http://mwp01.mwp.hawaii.edu/resources/wm7.htm (Univ of Hawaii at Manoa).

Have a Personal Conference

Talking to a student about his or her writing is much more effective than merely making comments on various papers. If you assign a formal essay, consider encouraging students to come to your office with a rough draft (preferably one already shared with a small group in the class and then revised) and specific questions. It is best if you can read the draft before the student comes, but it also works to read the draft as the student sits there, talking about it as you move from paragraph to paragraph. Often comments that seem opaque to the student in written form can be clarified in the office. Note that our handwriting is sometimes hard to read, too. The personal conference will help you to understand better where each of your students is coming from and will help the students see you as a coach rather than an evaluator. They will see that you truly want to help them learn. A conference can be limited to ten or fifteen minutes. This works best if you have read the essay beforehand and if the student comes with questions ready. With twenty-five students, that adds up to a lot of time. However, you can make the conference voluntary (extra credit and a sign-up sheet) and spread the conferences out over several days so you don't burn out.

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