Rhetorically-Situated Response: Getting to the Heart of our Questions

Prioritizing Feedback

How much is enough/too much? Is it better to prioritize feedback or to try to address every issue (including lower order concerns)?

• Nancy Sommers cautions teachers to keep the goal of the assignment in mind when responding to student writing. She notes, “teachers’ comments can take students’ attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers’ purposes in commenting” (“Responding” 149). Sommers suggests striving for continual reinforcement between comments on students’ writing and classroom instruction and activities.

• In Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment, Barbara E. Walvoord and Virginia Johnson Anderson emphasize that feedback has contextually-dependent roles (2). Feedback can:
  • Evaluate the quality of writing,
  • Communicate students’ strengths (and weaknesses) as writers,
  • Motivate future writing and revision, and
  • Provide organizational cues in the learning processes over a semester.

• As these multiple roles suggest, instructors should consider whether students benefit most from formative feedback or summative feedback, given the stage in the writing process and the overarching timeline of the semester.

• Emphasis on these multiple roles can be adapted to the rhetorical situation. For instance, feedback given early in the semester might focus on motivating students’ future writing and suggesting goals for the next writing task. At the end of the semester, feedback instead might prioritize communicating students’ strengths and evaluating the quality of their writing against community-accepted criteria (such as course objectives).

• In “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers,” Nancy Sommers notes that students focus revision activities on lexical changes. If teachers want students to extend the development of their ideas or to rethink their underlying ideas, feedback needs to emphasize those types of changes and set students up to plan appropriate revision strategies.

• Multiple studies reaffirm the importance of addressing surface-level errors within the context of students’ authentic writing, but research also cautions that students are more likely to apply comments about lower order concerns to their future writing if teachers engage in “minimal marking.” In other words, identifying a few (two or three) categories of errors (i.e., articles, commas after introductory clauses, comma splices, etc.) in each project and prioritizing those that interfere with meaning will have more impact on future writing than identifying all errors in the project.
  (See Haswell for one example of a minimal marking strategy.)

Situating Feedback and Engaging Students

What strategies can I employ to focus on the rhetorical effectiveness of students’ writing, moving beyond identifying writing strategies as right/wrong or focusing on justifying the grade?

What feedback strategies are most effective at engaging students? What will increase the likelihood of students’ active response to feedback? How can I craft feedback so that students will transfer my response to their future writing situations?

• Responses to student writing can connect assignments back to overarching course objectives. Teachers can:
  • Ask students to identify connections between evaluation criteria for individual assignments and course objectives. (Of course, this option assumes intentionality in the design of the course and assignments to support achievement of the objectives.)
  • Incorporate the language of course objectives in their responses to student writing.
  • Encourage students to reflect on their progress towards the course objectives and to write short responses to teacher-feedback. ENG 110 students could reflect on the strengths of their writing processes and/or comment on their ability to analyze and respond to a rhetorical situation (as characterized by the teacher-feedback). Students also could identify personal goals for working towards these objectives.

• Responses should communicate priorities for student learning in relation to course objectives. In other words, connecting to course objectives enables faculty to send a consistent message about what they (and the program) value.

• Walvoord and Anderson suggest:
  • Explaining what grades represent, using explicit evaluation criteria and placing the grade in the context of the course (and course objectives) (109-110).
  • Addressing feedback to the writer, not to the writer’s errors. Speaking to the writer encourages teachers to identify student achievements and to help students establish goals for future writing (110).
  • Saving comments for teachable moments, when students can act on the feedback to revise their writing (111-112). Offer feedback on work-in-progress, or if students have submitted a final version of a paper, connect feedback to course objectives so that students can apply the feedback to the next class assignment.
  • Communicating priorities, emphasizing global revisions over line-item edits if the revision might eliminate the applicability of the edits (115).

• Edwina L. Helton and Jeff Sommers promote an approach to grading that identifies student writing as “Early,” “Middle,” or “Late” in its development. Intrigued? Join us for the College Writing Reading Group, next week.

• In The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing, Cheryl Glenn, Melissa A. Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors note that teachers can situate feedback by working with students to develop class-based evaluation criteria. In other words, students take an active role in connecting expectations for their writing to the course objectives and the goals for the specific assignment. Faculty, in turn, focus their response on these community-based criteria. Glen, Goldthwaite, and Connors also note that rubrics can help instructors apply these criteria consistently and aid communication about the reader’s response in relation to the established criteria.

Rubrics as a Tool for Consistency and Efficiency

How can I use rubrics more effectively without becoming rigidly prescriptive?

How can I offer feedback more efficiently?

• Examples of rubrics: How do the different rubrics shape our responses?

Active Learners: Strategies for Promoting Revision and Transfer

• Prioritize comments to help students learn to prioritize their revisions.

• Anchor comments – to specific portions of the students’ texts, to evaluation criteria, and/or to course objectives. This rhetorical strategy contextualizes comments, helping students interpret the them and prioritize revision/future application.

• After providing formative feedback, require students to write detailed, specific revision plans. Revision plans can take several forms, including letters to teachers, commitments to students’ readers, or personal reflections.

• When returning summative feedback, require students to establish goals for their future writing based on the feedback they received and the course objectives. You can contextualize this activity further by scheduling it after the introduction of the next assignment; then students can tailor their goals to a specific future task – not the abstract idea of all future writing (which could reflect multiple genres, audiences, and purposes). This timing also introduces reflection on past communicative acts as a planning activity in the writing process.

Works Cited

Glenn, Cheryl,  Melissa A. Goldthwaite, and Robert Connors, eds. The St. Martin’s Guide to Teaching Writing. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2003.

Haswell, Richard H. “Minimal Marking.” College English 45.6 (1983): 600-604.

Helton, Edwina L., and Jeff Sommers. “Repositioning Revision: A Rhetorical Approach to Grading.” Teaching English in the Two-Year College 28.2 (2000): 157-164.

Sommers, Nancy. “Responding to Student Writing.” College Composition and Communication 33.2 (1982): 148-156.

Sommers, Nancy. “Revision Strategies of Student Writers and Experienced Adult Writers.” College Composition and Communication 31.4 (1980): 378-388.

Walvoord, Barbara E., and Virginia J. Anderson. Effective Grading: A Tool for Learning and Assessment.  San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998.

Tags: feedback, scholarship