"Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers (Article 1)

*Since there was no articles in the book that summarized what my inquiry project is about I looked for my own. Also, I would just like to start off by saying thank you to Prof. O'Rourke for recommending Nancy Sommers to me because I found a really good article written by her that is EXACTLY what I am doing for my inquiry project.*

The article was called "Responding to Student Writing" and I found it off JSTOR. Sommers was interested in what comments teachers put on students papers and what the students feel about them. She had said that the main reason teachers comment on students' papers is to reinforce the idea of the reader to them. Teachers play the reader role and make it apparent to the students. Also she goes on to say that there are two types of comments: "Comments create the motive for doing something different in the next draft; thoughtful comments create the motive for revising" (Sommers 149). To figure out what most teachers use she conducted a study with 35 teachers and students, and the teachers all "commented on the same set of three student essays"(Sommers 149). She then analyzed the types of responses given to the students and noticed the commonalities among them and how the students react to them.

The first affect she found that comments have on the students was that "teachers comments can take the students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting" (Sommers 149). This type of reaction occurs when teachers comment on usage and diction (Sommers 150). These comments leave the students unsure of what the teacher wanted them to change or do better. Most times this results from "contradictory messages"(Sommers 150) given by the teacher. This happens to me all the time where the teacher says to shorten a sentence within the paragraph but then on the margin says to expand the paragraph. In-text comments and marginalized ones often confuse the student on what the teacher wants them to do. "These different signals given to students, to edit and develop, to condense and elaborate, represent also the failure of teachers' comments to direct genuine revision of the text as a whole" (151). This leaves the student unsure of what is important to change with the way the comment is worded.

Most times teacher comments are on parts of the paper and not the paper as a whole. This leaves students to only edit the certain words or phrases mentioned and not anything else. "Misunderstanding of he revision process as a rewording activity is reinforced by their teachers comments" (151). Students then focus "on what the teachers commanded them to do than on what they are trying to say" (Sommers 151). Another issue that occurs most times is that teachers misread the students paper and comment on things that are not relevant. in the study she found that "teaches commanded students to reduce and condense what was written, when in fact what the text really needed at this stage was to be expanded in conception and scope" (Sommers 152). Her conclusion to this was one that was mentioned before about how students only revise what the teacher said to change. A phrase she used to describe this was a "balancing act" (Sommers 152) which I think summarizes it perfectly!

Sommers found her next commonality to be that "most teachers comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text" (Sommers 152). This is when teachers comments are too vague and could be applied to any paper. These make no sense to the student and they have no idea of how to go about changing them. Her suggestion to fix this problem would be to apply tips on HOW to change things not just letting them know that their is something wrong. This is the one suggestion or comment that is lacked on student papers. Teachers never "offered any strategies for carrying out these commands" (Sommers 153). These are needed because telling a student "'to be more specific' or 'to elaborate', does not show our students what questions the reader has about the meaning of the text, or what breaks in logic exist, that could be resolved if the writer supplied specific information; nor is the student shown how to achieve the desired specificity" (Sommers 153). Teachers offer the rules of the things that need to be changed not the strategies to do so and this makes the student think then that writing is all about rules.

The one way to put an end to all of this Sommers says, is to have a different set of guidelines and commentary for drafts of papers and the finished products. The feedback "needs to be suited for the draft we are reading" (Sommers 155). Students may be confused on which set of commentary you are giving them. So it is important to let them know which one is being used. However to defend teachers, they said they were never taught how to respond to students papers in school. That is true, in all of my English courses we are not taught how to access students papers. We look at theorists articles and summarize them or write papers on them but we never do exercises commenting on "students" work. So teachers have the tendency to look for errors in student writing and not go past that which produces a bad revision process of the student. Sommers suggests that teachers should "offer students revision tasks of a different order of complexity and sophistication from the ones that they themselves identify, by forcing students back into the chaos, back to the point where they are shaping and restructuring their meaning" (Sommers 159).