Responding to Student Essays

One of your most time-consuming tasks in teaching freshman writing will be to respond, evaluate, and critique your students' work. Most likely you will have twenty students (and some have two classes, so multiply by two), and in addition, you have graduate study of your own. So in addition to the sheer amount of pages, you also need to account for ways to 1.) Gain students' trust in your judgment, 2.) Understand what you are asking for, and 3.) Not overwhelm them.

The last, I think is the hardest. Regardless of how students feel about any given assignment, their writing is highly personal to them. It is difficult for them not to take critique as personal to themselves rather than merely about improving a piece of writing. Like it or not, their feelings are involved, and alienating them risks their ignoring all of the hard work you put in to help them.

You will have read commenting strategies from twelve different readers, and I'm sure that you noticed that their styles are very different ones. Their choices are determined by their various theoretical beliefs about writing, their interactions with their students, and their teaching experience. Ultimately you will all choose the style most appropriate to yourselves, but you should also bear in mind how your students may react. Some will be very sensitive to even the slightest negative comment..there's no help for that except reassurance that you are trying to help. Others may be quite open to comments no matter how harsh. Most students are averse to humorous comments--to them, the grade they will receive is serious business. Some will want more comments, but most can get by with less. They can only focus one two or three things at a time, realistically; and grammar, though important, should not be the first of them.

If our goal is to push them to think harder and more deeply, focusing on the surface errors encourages them to do the same, when what you really want is more development.

To save time, you can use one of several rubrics available in texts and online, but bear in mind that each student is an individual, and will need and deserve personal attention. Try to avoid the "rubber-stamp" comment ( "Introductions should pull the reader in and tell them what the essay is about") in favor of ones that take into account that essay particularly. Specifics are always more helpful, and class meetings are when discussion of the general parts of the essay and their purposes should take place.

There's no easy way to respond to students that I know of that is fast or easy. Sorry about that...just keep thinking about how much better they'll write--and how much more they'll be able to accomplish in life with these skills to back them up!