I thoroughly enjoyed reading Nancy Sommers’ (1982) article, as it addresses a concern that I’ve had ever since my student-teaching experience two years ago. Once I was handed a stack of student essays to grade, I realized that I had no idea how to grade essays. No one had taught me what comments to make and how much I should respond in the margins. Do I only respond to an interesting idea or when a student makes a sizeable error? I wanted to refrain from marking up every other sentence of an essay with red pen, since I know from experience that this can be extremely off-putting to students; generally the more red marks they see, the worse they believe their essays are. What can we do for students who need much assistance with revising and editing their work? Do we only comment on more serious errors without mentioning the inconsequential ones?
When I was in high school, I distinctly remember being the type of student who responded only to what the teacher wrote on my paper. If we had the opportunity to revise a piece, I would go through the paper and find all of the comments that the teacher made. The only changes I made to my papers were those that the teacher recommended. I remember always making the “cosmetic” changes first, such as spelling and grammatical errors. I usually saved any more complex revisions, including any paragraphs that needed more supporting details, until the end. When I did make changes that involved adding sentences and expanding on ideas, these changes were usually the “bare minimum” and very superficial. I would not typically look back at my essay as a whole piece and make additional changes that were not suggested by the teacher. As Sommers (1982) suggests, I was guilty of concentrating more on what my teacher “commanded [me] to do than on what [I was] trying to say” (p. 151).
While this may be an unfair judgment, I attribute much of my writing abilities (both good and bad) to my experiences in middle and high school. As Sommers (1982) suggests, I feel that my teachers did not explicitly teach writing strategies very often. However, my teachers’ comments did serve to imply that “writing is just a matter of following the rules” in some cases (Sommers, 1982, p. 153). While this is not the most positive example of teaching writing, those comments did help me greatly in determining the proper way to cite information and how to correctly spell certain words. Through these types of comments on my papers, I better understood how to write research papers. Unfortunately, the content of my writing and my own personal voice and writing style did not flourish through these responses. This is an issue that can be corrected through writing workshops, especially through the use of peer conferencing. In my experience, I have found that peers are more likely to respond to the content of another student’s paper, rather than individual grammatical or citation errors.
Sommers’ (1982) discussion of the lack of teacher training in responding to students’ writing stood out to me as especially meaningful. Teachers reported that “responding to student writing was rarely stressed in their teacher-training or in writing workshops” (Sommers, 1982, p. 154). When I read that sentence, I was prompted to think of my own undergraduate education courses, and I realized that there is only one instance in which I can distinctly remember assessing students’ essays based on a 6+1 Traits rubric. In terms of how to specifically respond to students’ essays, I had not received any instruction in this prior to student-teaching. Grading papers remains one of the most daunting tasks in my mind when I think about having my own classroom. I agree with Sommers (1982) when she asserts that, “instead of reading and responding to the meaning of a text, we correct our students’ writing” (p. 154). I believe that not only is it easier for many teachers to focus on spelling and grammar errors, but that we feel more comfortable pointing out these types of errors than making comments about students’ specific ideas and arguments. The more practice that we, as teachers, have with commenting on the ideas and meanings found in students’ writing, the more confident we will feel addressing these aspects of writing.
Sommers, N. (1982). Responding to student writing. College Composition and Communication, 33(2), 148-156.
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