Responding to Student Writing (not exhaustively)

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Date:    Sun, 22 Feb 2015 13:36:14 -0800
From:    Jonathan Hunt <jhunt2@USFCA.EDU>
Subject: voluminous written feedback and "over-efforting" instructors

Dear Colleagues,

A common bit of advice is to avoid overwhelming students with exhaustive
written feedback. As I understand it, it's a problem to provide too many
written comments for a few reasons:

  - can be overwhelming or discouraging for novice writers
  - makes it difficult for students to discern what Nancy Sommers has
  called a "scale of concerns"
  - is unlikely to result in comprehensive improvement
  - may result in instructor exhaustion and frustration

I'm writing about the last point: how do we help a frustrated, exhausted,
and sometimes desperate colleague stop "over-efforting" in this way (I'm
borrow this term from Claude Steele's Whistling Vivaldi, where it is used
in a very different context)? How can we convince them that they may
actually do better work by commenting less voluminously?

In my experience, writing instructors are sometimes very resistant to
modifying this practice.

Again, there's lots of advice on this... my sense is that avoiding
over-commenting is widely accepted. But is there any research on it? I have
seen some good stuff on feedback for L2 writers, but not for general
rhet-comp.

As always, your wisdom is appreciated.

Jonathan

--
Jonathan P. Hunt
Department of Rhetoric and Language
University of San Francisco
415.422.6685
https://www.facebook.com/rhetoricandlanguageUSF

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Date:    Sun, 22 Feb 2015 22:00:39 +0000
From:    "Ericsson, Patricia" <ericsson@WSU.EDU>
Subject: Re: voluminous written feedback and "over-efforting" instructors

Jonathan,

This piece is excellent:

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing; or, Looking for Shortcuts via the Road of Excess
Abstract: In all academic disciplines college teachers respond to student writing with shortcuts—checksheets, correction symbols, computer style checkers, etc. But while these methods save teachers time, do they help students improve their writing? A survey of research into teacher commentary, conceived of as a contextual discourse activity, initially questions the efficiency of many shortcuts because it finds complexities in all activity areas, in regulation (criteria, rules of genre and mode, disciplinary styles, and standards), consumption, production, representation, and identity. The research, however, also recommends particular shortcuts and methods of revising them for better efficiency and effect. It especially recommends restricting the volume of teacher commentary in ways that are task, discipline, and learner specific.

http://wac.colostate.edu/atd/articles/haswell2006.cfm
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Also, see "Options for Responding to Student Writing" (Peter Elbow)--copy in SSTW folder on my desktop.