Writing Across the Curriculum

FOCUSING YOUR COMMENTING ENERGIES

  Many experts agree that focusing your energy is the best strategy when it comes to assessing and evaluating.  Too much commenting is often overwhelming and frustrating for faculty (“there is so much in need of correction” and “students don’t pay attention to my comments”).  Too many comments are also overwhelming and frustrating for students.  Students can only take in so much information about a paper at one time and can be overwhelmed by papers covered in the literal and proverbial red ink.  Particularly because writing is such an egocentric activity, writers often feel overloaded by excessively detailed feedback about their writing.  Excessive detail may also make student writers feel as if s/he utterly lacks competence in writing or as if the teacher is taking control of the paper.

Focusing your commenting energies thus has benefits for students and faculty.  It leaves students in control of their writing so that they can consider revising--or at least learning from the experience of having written the paper.  It benefits faculty by enabling teachers to address the most important elements of a paper rather than getting bogged down in detail

Composition experts recommend that teachers comment on two or three of the most important features of a paper, determined either by the criteria for the assignment or by the seriousness of the effect on a reader of a given paper.  One way to do this is to identify “2 priorities for revision;”  “priorities” emphasizes that the suggestions are not the only possible things to revise, but are among the most important.  

This page was last updated on March 5, 2004.