Student Writing Feedback

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bob Reeser.

Hi, Bob. Welcome. Where are you calling from?

Tallahassee, Florida at Florida State University.

Well, hello. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m a college professor and associate dean here in the College of Ed. I’ve been here for about 35 years.

Oh, wow.

I had a question about my critiques of the papers my colleagues and students write. Oftentimes when I’m looking at these papers, I find myself commenting on the quality of their writing.

So if I think the sentences are well written and the paragraphs are well written and the ideas they’re expressing are clearly understood, I’ll write something on their papers like well written or clearly written. And I’ve been using those expressions now for many, many years.

And recently I’ve been thinking maybe I should start using some other expressions to express that point of view. So I went to the thesaurus, and I tried to look up synonyms for the term well-written. And oftentimes, they’re just too specific.

I came up with things like amusing, absorbing, and that just don’t really capture what I’m trying to get at.

You don’t get a lot of amusing and absorbing tips.

Well, they might be amusing or absorbing, but that isn’t always the case. So I’m wondering what thoughts you might have about terms I might use other than well-written or clearly written.

So your goal here is to reinforce good behavior on the part of the writer.

That’s right, if you want to take a behavioral point of view.

Yeah, because you’re trying to improve their writing, whether it’s a colleague or a student or whomever. That’s what you’re up to, right?

Sure.

It’s not just like saying, I approve of you as a human being. There’s a comment that I loved getting when I was at university, and this is more like this. Because it’s super easy to write. Frankly, let’s admit it.

Student papers in particular are really inconsistent. They might start out strong and end weakly, or they’ll have a few inspired moments along the way. But then there’s weak parts that should have been cut or should have never been put down in the first place.

And so you’re going to draw attention to the strong parts of it without spending too much time as a professor who’s got 30 to 60 papers to grade, right?

Well, that’s exactly right. And one of the problems is, because I’m commenting perhaps on two or three paragraphs that are well written, I’ll indicate using track changes that these paragraphs are well written. And then I find myself 10 paragraphs later saying the same thing.

So I like to kind of use different terms to get across that point. And so you’re talking really more about something that is well crafted or well argued rather than just grammatically correct.

That’s correct. That’s right. Now, I might not even agree with the ideas that are stated. I might even think that they’ve stated something that I disagree with. But nonetheless, they’ve made the point clearly.

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, and I think clarity needs to be recognized because having edited many texts myself, it’s a rare thing.

Well, I often tell my students that it’s more likely that a paper that’s well-written, even if the ideas might not be everyone would agree with, are more likely to be published than something where they’ve really designed a good study. But it hasn’t been clearly written.

You know, it’s interesting that Grant brought up what meant a lot to him. I remember a philosophy professor who would just put a checkmark next to things that he liked, or two checkmarks, or two checkmarks and two underlines, you know, underlined twice.

Right, right, right.

But I’m thinking, I mean, it sounds like you want more of a dialogue with your students. I don’t know if you have time for that.

Well, you know, a lot of my doctoral classes have been small. And more recently, I’ve been working primarily with young professors. I’m now an associate dean for research, and I’m helping them craft their grant proposals and so on.

So I like to give them more feedback than simply saying, you know, well-written or give them a couple check marks.

Right.

Well, I wonder what other professors say. We could certainly throw it out to our listeners. But what do you think about more like this?

I think that’s okay if we clearly indicate which paragraph we’re referring to. A line or an arrow or something, right?

Great, and I’ll be looking forward to hearing from other listeners who might have some suggestions, too.

Okay, yeah, we’ll pass them along if we get them, all right? Or when we get them.

Well, I really enjoy your show.

Thanks very much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Bob.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s the editor’s dilemma right there in a nutshell, right?

Yeah, and the professors. I mean, he raises a really interesting question about how you handle your students’ papers.

There was an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education just recently by Ann Curzan, whom we know. And she was talking about the difficulty of grading papers because sometimes you’re grading grammar. And it depends on, I mean, different professors’ understanding of grammar. And some professors are grading based on their pet peeves when they shouldn’t be.

Right. It’s utterly arbitrary in some cases, right?

Yes.

What you think is standard. Other people are like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa.

Yes. So what is constructive for you to do as a professor, right? And as close to universal as you can get.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it’s fair across the spectrum of papers you’d be grading.

Right, and certainly you want to grade for typos and failing to proofread, but it gets tricky when you get to points of grammar because some professors know grammar better than other professors.

So how do you do that? Or if it’s not the point of the class at all, right?

Right.

So that’s the question for you, dear listener. When you’re grading papers or when your papers are graded, what do you like to put down or what do you like to read? What encourages you to do better, and what discourages you from making those same old mistakes?

And maybe students can tell us which ones are most constructive for them.

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