Responding to Student Writing

In "Responding to Student Writing" and "Across the Drafts", Sommers offers some useful advice as to how writing instructors can provide better feedback to their students' papers. She notes that the best comments are those that are specific to the text, focus on concepts and meaning, and offer guidance for future papers. In a perfect world, all instructors would comment on students' papers according to Sommers's advice, but is this achievable in the real world? Taking into account time constraints and the scores of essays that teachers must grade each week, can we truly expect teachers to provide insightful, text-specific feedback on every student's paper?

I believe it's possible for all students to receive feedback that lives up to Sommers's standards, but it would take more than one person to do the job. The best way to achieve this would be to have the classroom participate in a multilevel revision process for their drafts. First, the students could revise each others' papers in small groups and focus solely on grammatical and organizational errors. This would reduce the need for the teacher to focus on grammatical errors while allowing more time for focusing on concepts and meaning. After students have commented on grammatical errors and teachers on conceptual errors, the students could post any questions that they may have on an online discussion board. This would provide the students with an opportunity to get clarification on any comments that they may be confused about. Furthermore, a discussion board in which students could discuss and share the comments they received on an essay may help reduce students' tendency to take their teacher's comments personally. The discussion board would allow all students to see that they are not the only one in the class who was told to "elaborate" on a concept or that a sentence was "awkward." It would help beginning writers realize that all students need improvement and that a teacher's comments are meant to instruct rather than scold.