ENGL 505A

On page 386, Sommers includes an illustration of a student's paper with comments on it given by a teacher. In her analysis of the example, Sommers notes, "In commenting on this draft, the teacher has shown the student how to edit the sentences, but then commands the student to expand the paragraph in order to make it more interesting to a reader. The interlinear comments and the marginal comments represent two separate tasks for the student." Sommers then goes on to explain how a teacher's interlinear and marginal comments could be at odds with each other as the teacher points out sentence-level errors while at the same time requiring discourse level revision (which may end up requiring the student to delete those sentences that contain the sentence-level errors). Sommers then goes on to state at the bottom of p. 390, "We need to develop an appropriate level of response for commenting on a first draft, and to differentiate that from the level suitable to a second or third draft. Our comments need to be suited to the draft we are reading."

I think the issue of offering students confusing advice on what to revise and which errors (e.g., discourse or sentence level) to concentrate on is easily solved with one or two options. The first strategy I have used is always requiring students to complete three drafts for an assignment. (Yes, it's more work for me, but I believe it is through the drafting process and their responses to my or other students' feedback is how students learn to become better writers.) For the first draft, I would read through students' papers and only make comments on discourse level issues (e.g., does the essay address the writing prompt, is the essay logically organized, are all ideas expressed clearly for the reader, is enough evidence given to support the author's claim, etc.), both within text and as summary comments at the end of the paper. The within text comments included my natural responses to what I was reading (e.g., Hmmn. Interesting statistic. I didn't know that...), while the end of text comments focused students on how they could best improve their paper for their next draft. In the second draft, I would focus more on sentence level issues. For the third and final draft, I wouldn't make a lot of comments within the text of the essay. I would simply write summary comments that justified the grade I was giving the student. And in order to grade the students' overall progress through drafting and to avoid grade inflation, each of the three drafts were graded, although weighted differently.

An alternative to the above involved having peers exchange papers for the first draft, giving them guiding questions or a peer review sheet to use as they read each other's papers (as we're doing for the latest assignment in 106), and then for the second draft I would comment on both discourse and sentence level issues, however in different colored pens (e.g., discourse level in green and sentence level in purple) as Crissy suggested one day in class. Many times students would receive both peer feedback and my feedback on the first draft so that I wouldn't have to comment on discourse and sentence-level errors at the same time in the second draft (which can be overwhelming, especially for international students).

With both of the above strategies, I would always give students a reflection form to fill out between essay assignments (not drafts but different assignments) which required them to look over both my discourse and sentence level comments on the different drafts of their previous assignments and then write for me what errors they would be particularly mindful of when writing for their next assignment. The reasoning for this was to put some of the onus back on the student, to learn from previous errors, rather than relying on my repeating the same comments from one assignment to the next.

I feel the above strategies have worked well in raising students' awareness to the importance of the revision process and have helped my students become better writers. My personal preference for a class like ENGL 106 would be to slow down and have students write a fewer number of different assignments. With basically having one assignment due per week, I feel I am focusing a bit more on product and getting assignments done than we are focusing on process. I would prefer to require fewer assignments and more drafting of those assignments as I believe this would be more beneficial for helping students to develop as writers.