When You Got A Subject And A Predicate

These past two mornings I’ve been attending a workshop on grading and commenting on student writing. Somehow it didn’t occur to me until after starting this session that most of the commenting I’ll be doing for my intro to public speaking course will be responding to speeches rather than writing per se. Still, the session was worthwhile. I ended up going to both session rather than skipping out as I intended to do if it just seemed like go-thru-the-motions bullshit. But it helped me realize how difficult it is to comment on student writing in a way that’s time efficient and helpful to the student.

On the first sample essays that I practiced commenting on, I leaned heavily towards copy editing in a journalistic way. Truncating sentences, shedding otiose adjectives, trying to suggest a more confident voice. This is the kind of feedback that I have particularly appreciated as of late (especially comments from Bill Lindeke from excitablemedia). Personally, I would love the chance to work with a good editor who would rip my language apart, just so I could start to see other possibilities for word choice and flow and identify my unconscious habits and self-imposed restrictions. The workshop, however, helped me realize this is not likely the kind comment that most undergrads need most. Perhaps the greatest single lesson of the workshop was the suggestion to think about how students will react to a first glance of the paper handed back to them. What will they think of something splotched with red on almost every line? A simple thought experiment in empathy that now seems obvious. The facilitator of the workshop suggested that comments need to be selected strategically based on where intervention is needed most – not only as a time saving strategy on the part of the instructor but also so as not to overwhelm the students.

It’s easy to think of writing instruction as a boring, mundane part of the job of an academic. It doesn’t help that the culture and publications that I’ve seen from the world of composition seem about as bland as it gets - perhaps this derives from an attempt by all parties to insulate writing instruction (in practice if not lipservice at least) from theory, politics . . . all the exciting stuff going on in universities. However, writing instruction is full of all sorts of deeply political and artistic questions. Writing practice (at whatever level) is certainly a technology of self. Helping students develop “their voice” in writing is a hotspot of institutional intervention on subjectivities and communicative habits.