Do As I Say, Not As I Do: Best Practices in Writing Feedback > Kara VanDam, Dean, School of General Education

I didn’t write my own papers in college.

Before this is taken as a gross admission of plagiarism, let me clarify. I wrote my own drafts, but when I turned them in for review, professors would invariably scratch-out and re-word sentences, scribble through what they felt were unnecessary commas, even change main ideas so completely that I wondered if they knew what my main points actually were. I found this form of feedback irritating, but I knew the game. They didn’t want me to write like me; they wanted me to write like them, and what they were doing wouldn’t make me a better writer generally: it would simply improve in their estimation the paper at hand. So I dutifully retyped my papers, made sentences I had thought elegant into ones written by another hand, deleted the commas that another felt were superfluous, and went along with the new main ideas even though they made my papers make less sense. As the English author Gilbert Chesterton once wrote, “You could compile the worst book in the world entirely out of selected passages from the best writers in the world.” My professors weren’t poor writers; their style was just not mine, the hodgepodge didn’t make a better paper, and I never did learn how to write better based on their feedback. I accepted it to get the grade.

When I became a writing teacher, I vowed not to make the same mistake. My goal was to make my students better writers, not simply to make them write a better individual paper, or for that matter to write like me. Don’t get me wrong—the temptation to reword and rework the prose, to remove superfluous punctuation (or insert what’s missing) can at times be overpowering. So I sit on my hands and I resist the temptation. A student is never going to learn where a comma goes by deducing why that one circled comma doesn’t go there. They are never going to learn to write a compelling thesis statement, or skillfully organize an argument by looking at the thesis sentence I wrote or by seeing how I would jumble the paragraphs in a different order.

Students learn by doing, and this is especially true in writing. All the sample essays and grammar exercises will not make a student a successful writer. Only writing and writing a great deal, and writing on which they receive valuable feedback will. The best feedback consists of:

Letting students know what they did well. This accomplishes several things: it lets them know what they don’t need to revise, it builds their self-confidence, and it makes them trust that the constructive criticism to follow comes from a place of support and coaching, rather than personal attack.

Pointing out repeated issues. A student who misuses one semi-colon doesn’t need a long spiel on semi-colon use. Focus feedback on patterns of errors that show a need for clarification.

Setting specific, achievable, and limited goals. Students look at paper feedback as a to-do list. If that to-do list becomes 50 unrelated and un-prioritized things—a capitalization error here, a logical fallacy there, a need for outside evidence here, a formatting issue there—students will (a) feel overwhelmed, and (b) as a result focus on the easiest things to fix because if they focus on the easy things, they will accomplish more of the to-do list. If the student really needs to improve how arguments are structured—something which takes far more thought and time than a punctuation error—which one will be done? Which one should be done? Allowing the student to focus just on argument structure one week and really improve these skills will allow the student to move on to the next goal the next week, and over the course of a term, a student makes measureable and notable progress – and the student knows it, feels the accomplishment, and becomes empowered to continue to achieve.

Writing well is a careful collaboration of many skills. It is an appreciation of audience and how one must tailor a piece of writing to its audience. It is the ability to lay out an argument logically, compellingly, and in a way that leads one’s readers to one’s conclusion without feeling they’ve been force fed it. It is the clarity that comes from using norms of punctuation, grammar and spelling, as errors in these distract readers from the heart of the message at hand (as the English playwright W. Somerset Maugham once wrote, “The best style is the style you don't notice.”). It is content and knowing when to use logic and when to bring in outside muscle with a data point, quotation, or reference to prior studies.

Students only become better writers when we allow them to build their skills in all these areas, and we provide them the support and feedback that fosters this. That’s not just writing teachers’ job: it’s everyone’s job.

[This article was originally published in our July, 2009 issue.]