I was a huge fan of the Sommers’ reading. Check this out:
“The challenge we face as teachers is to develop comments which will pro-vide an inherent reason for students to revise; it is a sense of revision as discovery, as a repeated process of beginning again, as starting out new, that our students have not learned. We need to show our students how to seek, in the possibility of revision, the dissonances of discovery-to show them through our comments why new choices would positively change their texts, and thus to show them the potential for development implicit in their own writing.”
This gave me nerd chills: commenting can be helpful to students provided the comments are actually phrased in a constructive manner.
The least helpful form of commenting is when professors say vague, ambiguous negativity. When I was in school most of my professors would say random negative things, “This doesn’t make sense,” “I don’t like this,” and “Sentence Fragment.” Not only does this form of commenting leave the student feeling hurt, but also it gives them no idea how they can make it better. Obviously the student would have made it better if they knew how, but with this form of commenting it’s like the teacher is standing on top of their grave and yelling at them not to be dead.
This is why I’ve tried to make my commenting in ENC1101 more suggestive based. For example, when I start a paper off, if the student uses vague language, I’ll try to give a suggestion for how they could be more specific with their language. “In your introductory paragraph, you need to be more specific about the word ‘problems.’ Economic? Social? Pyschological? Narrow it down.” Then later on when I say things like “vague language,” I tell the student to refer back to the example I showed them in their introductory paragraph. Utilizing this method of constructive specificity with my commenting, I’ve had a positive reaction from students.
In my morning class, I have two students who are already doing better. One of the students got a “D” on his first paper because he fudged his margins and used vague, generic language in order to convey the idea of saying profound things without actually saying anything at all. In his paper I told him so with my comments. His second essay has all of the commented areas fixed as well as improvements to other areas. His grade for this 2nd paper is a “B.”
Comments can be helpful, but they need to be written in a way that the student can understand and make use of. Further, commenting isn’t enough; students also need to feel like their teacher is a real person, and not just some vague authoritarian abstraction hovering over their shoulder, screaming every time they use the passive voice or make a comma splice. Personal relationships create a sense of trust with students so that when they read teacher comments, they know and want to pay attention. The more I do this teaching business, the more I’m realizing that it’s all about respect.