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.