Making the Comments Count

Commenting on students’ papers is a topic of great interest for me, especially given my background in secondary education. In my undergraduate English licensure courses, we sometimes spent an entire class period practicing writing thorough and helpful comments on students’ papers. Then we had to include evaluated students’ work in our student teaching portfolios. I have always enjoyed commenting on student papers, and I credit my professional and engaging instructors who encouraged me to engage in my students’ work rather than simply stain them with red ink. Connors and Lunsford’s article “Teachers’ Rhetorical Comments on Student Papers” sympathizes with overworked teachers who struggle to find the time to write extensive commentaries; however, the data from the article’s study proves that we, as teachers, are not always commenting on what we are saying is important nor do we focus on our students’ writing as a continual work in progress. While I acknowledge that there is still room for improvement in this and all other teaching practices, I am confident that this is one of my strengths as an instructor. According to the essay, in the history of writing instruction the ideas that students have something worthwhile to say and that teachers are their students’ real audience are relatively new, yet they strongly affect the way teachers will respond to their students’ writing (203-204). If we focus more on global comments and the effectiveness of the piece in considering its rhetorical situation then we will be able to provide comments that could positively influence our students and their writing rather than discourage them. The easy thing to do is to mark where words have been misused and semicolons are needed, but these corrections cannot make our students better writers. If we expect our students to write with the rhetorical situation in mind, how can we expect anything less from ourselves when we are evaluating/commenting on their work?
For as long as I have been turning in papers to teachers, I have enjoyed getting them back so I could look at the comments. Which comments meant the most to me? It wasn’t the ones that pointed out a typo or a grammatical error or some punctuation mishap. The comments that I loved to read were the global ones. The comments that stated my teacher enjoyed reading my work and had some suggestions for how to make it even better. As a student, I do my best work when I know that my teachers care about me and my scholastic growth, and even though I am now a graduate student, this still holds true.
I was disheartened to hear a favorite instructor of mine say that he hoped all of his students’ essays were “Bs.” When I asked why, he told me that a B paper does not require any comments or grade justification; simply, they’re the easiest/quickest to grade. Now, I have a strong respect for this man’s abilities as a teacher; therefore, I attribute his weariness of commenting on papers to something Connors and Lunsford covered: teachers are overworked, have a multitude of students, and, have plenty of other responsibilities. Writing lengthy comments on papers takes time, but done wholeheartedly they can truly improve student writing. At the very least, this article has reminded me of why it is essential to not only include extensive comments on students’ writing but to make the suggestions correlate with what we expect them to learn from our course.

Bringing Students' Writing to the Forefront

First of all, I would like to address the issue of genre that I promised to reintroduce to my class this week. After reading last week’s article I realized that I had miss-taught the concept of genre by defining it as a means to categorize writing styles; however, I now understand it to be a unifier of dichotomies such as style and content, form and context. Instead of relating the complexity and inclusive nature of genre to Swale’s discourse community definition, I decided to explain it through our rhetorical analysis piece, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. As a class, we discussed how the text’s form could not be separated from its content, purpose, audience, and social context. We concluded that genre encompasses all five components of the rhetorical situation and that it is not a static process. Rather than simply studying the definition of genre, we put it into conversation with not only the speech but also with the students' own papers.
Kathleen Welch’s article “Ideology and Freshman Textbook Production: The Place of Theory in Writing Pedagogy” focuses on the importance of using students’ work as the writing classroom’s primary texts and textbooks as secondary references. Textbook examples alienate the students because they are usually presented out of context (273). The students do not benefit from these perfect and, consequently, purposeless papers that offer no explanation for the writer’s writerly choices. When classes focus on students’ papers, teachers can highlight the rhetorical situation. Students can talk about what they did and why they did it and whether or not it was successful; then they can debate what they could do to make their work more effective. Last semester in 101 we stressed that writing is a recursive process, but textbook examples seldom illustrate this. By concentrating on student writing, teachers can prove to students that writing is fluid and, like language itself, ever changing (274). Welch advocates for student writing as the best example of powerful writing: “By giving up the disconnection and decontextualizing of freshman writing texts, we unlock the energy of the students’ and our own expertise as writers” (274). Following this method supports the idea that students are not only capable of producing readable texts but that they are already writing experts in the sense that they see language as living. Presenting writing instruction in this more effective and personal manner proves to students that they are already successful writers and that composition courses are not a waste of their time.

Re-Thinking and Re-Teaching Genre

Just when I thought I had finally gotten this genre stuff all figured out, I read Devitt’s article “Generalizing about Genre,” and I realized that I had been as lost as my students. “Genre” sounds too complicated a term for something simply describing form, and, as it turns out, it is much more involved. I definitely have some explaining to do for my students who still believe that genre only means knowing the difference between an essay, a letter, and an e-mail. Actually, I think Devitt’s more encompassing definition of genre will make more sense. We tell our students that context (both textual and social), form, situation, purpose, and audience all impact writing, the writer, and the reader, yet we try to break up these integrated components into separate dichotomies. Devitt provides a way out of the corner that we have found ourselves facing. We do not have to choose between whether the context or the form determines the genre of the piece because they are both factors. When students learn that rhetorical situations are all about making well-informed choices rather than memorizing which form and style to use in every situation, they will become unburdened. Understanding genres allows students to tap into their previous experiences and knowledge about a particular piece of writing, without having to start from scratch every time they sit down to write out a grocery list or a research paper.
This semester in my 102 class we have discussed genre several times. I know that my students have heard this term in other classes, but the definition doesn’t stick with them. I think it is because they also realize that “genre” is a much larger concept than they are being taught. Starting next week, I am going to attempt to expand their view of genre by building on what I know they already know: that genre is connected to form. Since my students are much more familiar now with the idea of a discourse community and because Devitt uses John Swales’ definition of a discourse community to illustrate his own point, I plan on using discourse communities as a springboard for re-teaching the complete definition of genre. I will report back next week with the results of this in-class experiment.