Responding to Student Writing

   Responding Guidelines

    Below are general recommendations:

• Provide formative rather than summative feedback. We do not provide students with feedback to simply justify a grade. We need to consider the writer's intention and purpose and suggest alternatives to executing his or her intentions. The emphasis should be on teaching students to ask the critical questions that writers ask when revising -- as opposed to focusing on the quality of a particular manuscript.
   
• Require multiple drafts. According to decades of research, students benefit from our responses to their writing only when we respond to several drafts. Grading essays should facilitate the learning process. Students should be able to revise their work based on our constructive feedback. Otherwise, they often ignore our commentaries no matter how beneficial they may be.
   
• Place students in peer groups and show them how to evaluate their classmates' work. Peer editing promotes critical thinking and leads to the development of editorial skills. It also helps students better understand the needs, interests, expectations of audiences other than the teacher.
   
• Act as a sounding board for students. The instructor's role is to focus the writer's attention on the relationship between intention and effect, helping the writer see confusions in the essay and explore other alternatives. Final writing decisions should be the writer's, not the instructor's.
   
• Encourage students to view revision as way to discover and clarify one's purpose and meaning. Getting it right the first time is not the goal.
   
• Avoid giving students too much advice by identifying only one or two patterns of errors at a time. Writing well involves more than forming grammatically correct sentences. Responding to the substance and significance of a student's efforts is more fruitful.
   
• Praise positive aspects of each paper. Like anyone else, students respond to encouragement and positive reinforcement. When essays are inundated with corrections, even the most experienced of writers can lose confidence.
   
• Avoid abstract, textbook revising and editing remarks. Students are not professional copy editors. Research indicates that they seldom understand or respond to such remarksAdditional
   
• Omit grades on individual essays. Grades often transform the instructor's coaching role to that of gatekeeper. An alternative to grading individual papers could be asking students to keep writing portfolios. At the end of the semester, students select the essays that they want to be graded.

    Adapted from: Moxley, Joseph. "Responding to Student Writing: Goals, Methods, Alternatives." Freshmen English News 17 (Spring 1989): 3-4.

     Additional guidelines

        Responding to Student Papers