Sommers, "Responding to Student Writing"
Sommers examines instructor comments on student drafts, making four significant observations about the instructor comments: first, they tend to be contradictory, asking a student, for example, to edit sentences for conciseness, while simultaneously asking the student to expand the paragraph those sentences appear in; second, they do not differentiate between process and product or first draft and final draft; third, they are vague and impersonal, failing for the most part to make reference to specific details of a student’s draft; and fourth, they do not indicate a sense of proportion or importance, so that a comment on punctuation appears to carry as much weight as a request for more details. Sommers reminds us that instructor comments should provide a reader’s voice for students and help them revise for a reader. To achieve this, instructor comments should focus less on vaguely pointing out “broken rules” in a draft and more on helping writers figure out strategies for making significant changes to their drafts. Sommers argues that our comments on student drafts need to “forc[e] students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning” (153), and also that “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” (154).
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