Putting Our Distance from Students in Perspective

1. Many writing teachers did well in, or placed out of first year composition. They did well in other  English and writing courses that they took, adapting to the types of comments they received from their teachers.
2. As graduate students and teachers who went on to learn our discipline's vocabulary, ways of thinking, genres for publishing and writing, we changed--evolved if you prefer--into writers and scholars for whom the academic and professional ways of thinking and writing are second nature and obvious.

Liking, Grading, and Evaluating

The distinctions at play here are from Peter Elbow's "Ranking, Evaluating, and Liking: Sorting Out Three Forms of Judgment."  Only, instead of ranking, I've substituted the term grading.

In our responses we need to do the same for students. Learn to like their honest attempts at writing. Remember that for them, many of our assignments are initiations into foreign forms and ways of thinking, that they are, in the words of Donald Bartholomae, "inventing the university." They become as children learning to speak being, by mimicking what they've read. So we need to like bad starts, confused passages, dead ends, and all the other necessary elements of writing and we need to show students that these things are inevitable, changeable, instructive, valuable, and in fact, necessary to their growth as a writer. We need to help them recognize and like their own bad writing so that they won't be afraid of producing it.

It's easy to like good stuff, to take pleasure in reading our students good writing. We need to read the stuff that's not so good in the same way a parent listens to a child struggling to utter a sentence--not to fix the utterance, but to hear and respond to what is being said. We need to read as readers, not judges and teachers, and to respond in that voice to help students see the value of communicating.

Grading (Ranking)
No matter how much you like your students and learn to like their writing, no matter how carefully you evaluate and write careful responses, the 1,000 pound gorilla in the classroom economy is grading. Students do like to know how they're doing. And how you choose to arrive at grade--what gets graded, systems for arriving at final grade, and so on determine the atmosphere for liking, risk-taking, experimentation, evaluation, assignment design, peer review (which should be part of the response ecology), and more. We enter the class with a syllabus and a teaching philosophy--things that set goals, offer promise, and establish a framework for teaching and learning. But syllabi and philosophies and theories are to a classroom what a speech is to governance. If you really want to know what a government values, look at its budget--where it spends, where it cuts, where it offers incentives. If you really want to get at the structure of a classroom, and what will be of value, look at how a teacher establishes a grading policy, economy, and reward system. Does peer review work get considered and valued in the grade? How, and by what criteria? What is the role of revision and how is that encouraged? What counts as revision? Where do discussion and reading fit in? Attendance and meeting class deadlines and assignment completion? What kinds of grades are given--letter grades, number grades, a system of checks, deferred grading in a portfolio model--and when--draft by draft, paper by paper, holistically, only at midterm and year end?

How do students know where they stand, and what they're learning as they go? How is this connected to the way response is given on their writing? Is their grade affected by how they use your response? Does that make responses more prescriptive? Are students held to fixed a standard, graded on personal progress, or a mixture of both?

All these questions and more set the climate for a classroom, for learning, and for how students will view response, revision, and peer review.

Evaluating
Writing doesn't happen in a vacuum. We give students assignments meant to introduce them to the kinds of writing we think will be important to them and necessary, both in college as beginning scholars and academics, but also beyond. We focus, then, on analyzing rhetorical situations to understand audience, purpose, and context. We teach them specific methods of argument and particular genres; we ask them to write and use certain vocabularies, points of view, theories and ways of thinking. We want them to learn how to revise their work, think self-consciously and critically about their writing habits and processes. We ask them to engage in sophisticated research projects, to synthesize and interpret, and analyze, and explain complex ideas, some they're only learning and thinking about for the first time. We want them to change, as much as we like their attempts and who they are as people, we want them to change how they write. So we do need to evaluate their work and give them feedback and insights that help them look critically at their own work.

For Elbow, evaluating is the most crucial stage. He describes it as:

. . . the act of expressing one's judgment of a performance or person by pointing out the strengths and weaknesses of different features or dimensions. We evaluate every time we write a comment on a paper or have a conversation about its value. Evaluation implies the recognition of different criteria or dimensions -- and by implication different contexts and audiences for the same performance. Evaluation requires going beyond a first response that may be nothing but a kind of ranking ("I like it" or "This is better than that"), and instead looking carefully enough at the performance or person to make distinctions between parts or features or criteria.

• Responses should be descriptive, with suggestions that offer the writer choices.
• Responses should be focused on a few key issues or patterns in the writing. Less is more.
• Responses should begin in reply to writer. Every draft should include some note from the writer to you or their peers telling how he or she is rhetorically framing the writing and what their goals are.
• Responses should tell why, both why things worked for you as a reader, and why they didn't. Stress your role as reader by using phrases such as, "When I read this passage, I . . ." "As I read, I liked how you described X, it made me think of Y."
• Responses that use words such as 'vague' or 'awkward' should explain why the passage struck you as vague or awkward.
• Responses that use technical language--"subject/verb agreement," "independent clause," and so on--should explain those terms (or they should have been explained or discussed prior to their use).  Most people don't use this stuff, even established writers, everyday.  Also remember, for most students, a handbook is not a transparent reference. It is to them what a technical manual on rewiring an automobile engine (or heck, just programming a VCR) is to us.
• Responses from teaches should be part of a matrix of response that includes planned and guided peer review (where students might sometimes rewrite the comments they give one another), writer self-reflection and self-review (which items can be given to teachers and peers to help shape responses) and class discussions about the ideas and issues being written about (Online discussions--in MOO's, email lists, threaded discussion boards--are especially useful because students start thinking and talking by writing. Through the miracle of copying and pasting, words written in different online settings can be transposed to essay drafts, helping to jump start writing and giving students a way break the tyranny of the blank screen.).
• Responses--from teachers and fellow students alike--should be thought of as micro-essays. They are to a particular audience, with a purpose, and written in particular context. For student peer reviewers, responses ask them to read closely, to analyze and describe the text, to evaluate it and offer suggestions, and to write clearly enough for the writer to understand what they're saying. All in all, no different than many essay assignments.
• Responses should be varied and timed to be relevant. Pointing out a grammar error in a sentence that might disappear as revisions take place doesn't help the writer as much as suggesting a way to rethink what they're saying, helping them then to the revision that will eliminate the error anyway.
• Response to surface errors is necessary and important, but needs to be done with care and generosity. Copyediting and proofreading are essential skills, and need to be taught in workshops and addressed in responses. I like to teach them when students have stuff that's ready to be copyedited. Another essential skill all writers learn: how to find someone who is good proofreader and editor and learn from them, but also sometimes rely on them and trust them. Error logs, helping students see patterns of error, and in some cases, even small doses of skill and drill when it's targeted and in the context of a particular student's needs are all useful. The best way for me to address these areas is to treat surface features as rhetorical choices. So a comma splice is not simply a 'CS' notation in the margin, it's a point of departure for a discussion of sentence structure, voice, and reader expectations. It might be fixed by a quick deletion or addition, or by revising the sentence, perhaps the paragraph. It becomes like a stone dropped in a puddle, and the consequences of considering it can have a ripple effect and lead to wider considerations.
• Responses should be based, sometimes, on reader response. Simply reading student writing and responding to it conversationally, not as a teacher, but as an interested reader, helps writers re-engage their ideas.
• Responses should sometimes be withheld. Providing what Elbow calls 'evaluation free zones' offers three benefits. One, it lets you read and get to know your writers voices and styles. This lets you take home papers, read a batch, and return them without comment at all. You can talk generally in class about a range of things. It establishes that you're a reader. And two, it also sets up the value of peer review--that you won't always comment on everything, and that peers have to learn how to help one another (which should be backed up by teaching peer review). And third, it lets you establish that you will skim and read and check work regularly, sometimes commenting, sometimes not, which helps students in a number of ways:
• It sets deadlines for having something for you to read, which helps them space their writing.
• It makes it easier to do mini-conferences with students, where you can more quickly and pointedly address key issues.
• It helps guard against plagiarism--simply by collecting work and asking to read it, you can learn sooner when and where students are struggling to keep up with work, to integrate sources if the project involves research, to develop drafts and stay focused.
• Responses don't always have to be written. In fact, when I teach, I move from written response to oral responses and have students move from oral to written responses, changing roles. This makes student responses the responses of record. My responses become more focused and targeted. I might take home writing and only read it, and then discuss it in conference with a student or small group of students either via office hours, via online chats and/or MOO's, or in class. Sometimes I have students come and I don't read anything before hand, but look at the work on the spot, much the way a writing center tutor might. Sometimes students come in groups of two or three. In each variation, the idea is to respond quickly and pointedly, and to adjust my voice--either aural or online--to students body language, questions, and concerns (and yes, there is a kind of body language that takes place online). When I'm busiest, in fact, it's more efficient and productive to schedule mini conferences--which allows me to block chunks of campus time and not give it up for committee meetings and other work--and meet students during the day. I give better response in less time than I would taking papers home and spending 30 to 45 minutes writing something in the margins of a paper, in an email note, or on a WWW site.