In this section, Cynthia Taft shares strategies she uses to provide students with feedback about their writing.
Instructor Feedback
Peer review gives students their first real experience with an authentic audience.
—Cynthia Taft
All of the major writing assignments go through at least two stages. My students hand in a completed draft and receive detailed feedback from me and from a small group of peers (see below). For some time, I have done electronic commenting. While I suspect that we all read more carefully and accurately when we work with paper copies, my handwriting is terrible and I love the fact that marginal comments allow me to maintain a steady conversation with the writer. Unless I notice a recurrent mechanical problem, I merely highlight diction and syntax problems and leave the student to figure out what is wrong. Once I have worked my way through the entire paper, I reread my marginal comments and write a final comment in which I try to pull together the major issues. If the paper is a draft rather than a final version, I will provide general guidelines for revision.
Peer Feedback
I have relied on peer feedback in my writing classes for more than twenty years. Peer review gives students their first real experience with an authentic audience. I know from my fellow instructors that many different peer-review strategies work well. I have kept to one pattern: each student paper is read by at least two peers who provide detailed written comments in response to a set of questions. Left to their own devices, students often zero in on small issues, both because these issues are easier to spot and because they are afraid of hurting one another’s feelings. My questions are designed to push them to consider larger issues, such as structure and logic, and to note all the places where the writer loses them or confuses them. If a fellow student is confused by what you have written, you need to fix it. I do not need to intervene.
Workshops
(This photo is in the public domain.)
Occasionally, I will conduct impromptu workshops in which students exchange short papers or exercises and consider a single question about that exercise. Most of the workshops for full drafts, however, are carefully scripted. The small groups of students who have shared papers come to class after having written detailed comments in response to my guidelines. They exchange written comments with one another, but then I ask them to consider some new question or questions about the draft and to talk about each paper in turn during the class time provided.
Together, the advance peer review and the in-class workshop help students develop as writers and editors. With each round of peer review, students become more sophisticated as readers and editors. Eventually, they can apply their insights to their own work as well as to the work of their fellow students. Perhaps just as important, they come to see writing, feedback, and revision as integral features of the writing process.