Responding to Student Writing

When creating a writing assignment, teachers obviously have an idea of how they want it to be written. But do their ideas and opinions stick with them when revising and grading students papers. Every person is different in his or her writing style; do teachers forget this? This seems to restrict students in their writing. They feel they can only focus on the comments teachers have noted and not what they think is wrong and could be fixed. A revision by the teacher is just one person’s opinion, which may very well be bias. Revision creates several problems for students, why and how can they be fixed?

For example, when a teacher says remember your audience, who really is your audience? Most students will use the teacher as their audience because this is the only person who is going to read their papers. This restricts students to truly expand and capture the appropriate audience for a specific paper. Perhaps group work would help this restriction, giving a student a broader audience to look at and receive feedback from. This may allow students to see different readers opinions and how they interpret a student’s paper.

Many teachers are repetitive when editing a paper, which again shows they have one strong opinion they are exercising to the class. In Sommers reading “Responding to Student Writing” she says, “Most teachers comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text.” The teacher is showing what they want in a paper, which eliminates diversity among papers. In my opinion this would make reading these papers very boring and repetitive.

Sommer also says that writing becomes a guessing game to students. When teachers give a vague comment such as, “choose a precise language” or “think more about your audience” a student might wonder what does this really mean? How do I choose a precise language and who really is my audience. Once again this is a teachers own opinion and the audience is pointed
toward the teacher. The teacher gave no suggestions on how to improve on his or her comments, they are simply just stated.

I feel if a teacher is going to give comments and then allow for revision, then the comments themselves should be more specific; guiding the students. By simply stating what a teacher sees as wrong is not giving students suggestions on how they can improve or change their paper for their final draft. For example, Sommers tells her readers the mistakes teachers face in responding to student writing is, “teachers do not respond to student writing with the kind of thoughtful commentary which will help students to engage with the issues they are writing about or which will help them think about their purposes and goals in writing a specific text.”

I think teachers should leave out the comments on usage errors and grammar to a later draft, just as Sommers suggest. A teacher should focus on the context of the text making sure the student is pointed in the right direction, sticking to the topic, and writing to a proper audience. Perhaps allowing for several revisions before submitting a final draft.

It is hard to truly say what is right and wrong because everyone is different and learns in different ways, but experimenting and using suggestive advise on how to improve on how to respond to students writing is crucial. People want what is best for students and the best ways for them to improve on their writing skills.