Weekly Response: Nancy Sommers's "Responding to Student Writing"

Nancy Sommers asserts that writing teachers spend most of their time "responding to and commenting on student writing." Amen. I read 100 essays this weekend. Sommers begins to quantify time spent commenting on student writing. Here's the math:

Low end = 20 minutes per paper X 20 students X 8 papers per semester = 53.33 hours/semester
or, expressed in 8-hour work days, that would be approximately 7 days of work per semester.
High end = 40 minutes per paper X 20 students X 8 papers per semester = 106.66 hours/semester
or, expressed in 8-hour work days, that would be just over 13 work days per semester.

Yes, that's how it was until I discovered the beauty of both the Writing Center for responding to student writing and rubrics for commenting on final papers. Now, I'm below the low end estimates.


How do we know if our comments help students become better writers? According to the author, we comment on students' writing to help them imagine a reader and to offer assistance with their writing. According to the research of Sommers and her team, often instructors' feedback is mean-spirited. Also, it turns the focus from writing to communicate an idea to writing to please the instructor or follow his directions. She shows a piece of writing with instructor comments and notes the contradictions: the comments between the lines assume the piece is finished; the comments in the margins assume revision is required.

Interesting. I hadn't thought about it in those terms. I found that students were either confused by or ignored most of my comments, so I stopped writing them.

Sommers explains that the teacher's notes can mislead the student to believe that revision is only a "rewording activity" because the story is already finished and just needs tweaking.

Since the teachers' comments take the students' attention away from their own original purposes, students concentrate more...on what the teachers commanded them to do than on what they are trying to say.

Evidently, students will hesitate to revise a section that they feel needs revision if a teacher did not mark it. It would be risky to revise what has already passed inspection. Further, teacher comments are too often vague and not specific to the text, creating a guessing game for students. Commands and suggestions for improvement are offered, but strategies on how to effect the required changes are not. Lack of teacher training in responding to student writing may be part of the problem.

Hmm, I responded to my students the way I had received response in high school and college in literature classes. So I can agree in my case that I had no training in how to respond to student writing. I quickly learned that making notes on drafts and final papers was extremely time consuming for me and added little value for the student, so I changed method in favor of conferences and Writing Center visits for works in progress, and rubric responses for final papers. I have no data to determine if these methods are effective in improving student writing, but I do know that they save me hours while giving my students more one-on-one attention.

Instead of finding errors or showing students how to patch up parts of their texts, we need to sabotage our students' conviction that the drafts they have written are complete and coherent.

The suggestion offered is to respond to meaning only when responding to a first draft, because much of the first draft will be revised away. We should focus on mechanics only in later drafts. Further, she suggests classroom activities should include revision exercises. She ends by encouraging teachers to focus on revision and not wordsmithing, so students can discover the potential of their own writing.