Presentation on student writing

1. Writing Responses Students Will Use:
Reinforcing Intellectual Values &
Practices through Comments
Nicole B. Wallack, PhD, Director
Undergraduate Writing Program
Columbia University
Department of English and Comparative
Literature
AHA 2015
nicolewallack@columbia.edu

2. Why do we respond to student work?
We comment on student work
• to fulfill part of an intellectual/professional
contract we make as college and university
faculty.
• to assess students’ work in light of the
expectations and values of the assignment, of
the course, and (perhaps) history as a
discipline.
• to individualize the course experience for
students.

3. Challenges for faculty
• Labor intensive: Responding takes time
and energy.
• Can make us feel at odds with students,
defensive.
• Not sure how to help students improve on
future assignments in our course and
others.

4. Challenges for students
• Overwhelmed or underwhelmed by the amount.
• Focus on errors and deficits.
• Hard to tell which issues are most important
(HOC/LOC).
• Advice about improvement can be vague,
abstract, or inconsistent from assignment to
assignment.
• Effort may be disregarded, minimized, or
impugned.
• Talked “at” rather than engaged in an exchange.

5. There are risks…
• Responding is an intimate act—intellectually
speaking. Can be emotionally charged for all
concerned.
• Students may learn primarily to read our
responses as idiosyncratic preferences, not
shared by others in our discipline or institution.
(…students may be right about this last
point).

6. There are rewards…
• We can engage students in the critical
practices and dispositions they need to
work intelligently and responsibly with
historical material.
• Commenting can make visible (or
newly visible) the key concepts,
methods, and warrants for the course.
• Responding to student work can enact
“listening rhetoric” (Wayne Booth).

7. Listening Rhetoric in Comments
From Wayne Booth, The Rhetoric of Rhetoric: The
Quest for Effective Communication (Blackwell, 2004)
In listening rhetoric, “both sides join in a trusting
dispute, determined to listen to the opponent’s
arguments, while persuading the opponent to listen in
exchange. Each side attempts to think about the
arguments presented by the other side….Both sides are
pursing not just victory but a new reality, a new
agreement about what is real” (46-47).

8. How can we reinforce intellectual
values through comments?
• Provide individual and collective responses.
• Draw on what students can do to prioritize what
they need to attempt next. (Lev Vygotsky’s ZPD)
• Establish, teach, and use a limited set of class
terms.
• Show students how/why to consult previous
responses.
• Delegate some responding to students for
themselves and for their classmates.

9. Providing individual responses
students can (and will) use
Beginning
Observe and Diagnose
Middle
Speculate and Hypothesize
Prioritize and Design
End
Encourage and Set Goals

10. Providing responses to
a whole class
Cover letter
“The strongest papers showed X, average pieces
reflected Y, most struggling tended to Z.”
Excerpts from student papers of “writerly moves”:
• compelling claims
• insightful analysis of evidence
• deft integration of sources
• substantive counterarguments
• sentence structures that manage complex ideas
• elegant transitions

11. Teaching students to
respond
To their own work:
Write a cover letter to you/other readers. Might include
an abstract, acknowledgments, reflections on their writing
process, feedback about class work, questions.
Ask students to review readers’ responses to earlier work
and summarize them right before they draft the next
project.
To peers’ work:
Practice descriptive responding techniques before
prescriptive ones.

12. “[All] good rhetoric depends on the
rhetor’s listening to and thinking about the
character and welfare of the audience,
and moderating what is said to meet what
has been heard” (Booth, 54).