Review 1, week 1

Review 1, week 1: Nancy Sommers- "Responding to Student Writing"

Nancy Sommers argues that educators do not know how to comment on student writing in a way that effectively assists those students to become better writers. After detailing the theoretical motivations behind teacher commentary on student work, which consists of confirming or denying communication of meaning as well as dramatization of the role of a reader, she asks the question: "Do teachers comment and students revise as the theory predicts they should?"

In her efforts to glean the answer to this question, Sommers, alongside her colleagues Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach, has studied thirty-five teachers and their commentary on student work. In addition to these teachers and their associated students, they also used a computer program that analyzes writing and provides editorial comments and identifies errors such as grammar, spelling, usage, etc.

The problem Sommers identifies is that "teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting" (149). Essentially, students stop focusing on developing their work and simply make the changes the teacher suggests. Further, Sommers suggests that teachers demand students to accomplish impossibilities. "Students are commanded to edit and develop at the same time; the remarkable contradiction of developing a paragraph after editing the sentences in it represents the confusion we encountered in our teachers; commenting styles... The processes of revising, editing, and proofreading are collapsed and reduced to a single trivial activity" (151). Personally, I never read for grammar and spelling the first two times I look at a rough draft, and since Sommers only provides two examples in her article, I question the scope and span of her work. She does not provide any demographics of the educators- how long have they been teaching? What's their education background? I feel that in order to explore teacher commentary with more clarity, not only does she need to provide this information, but she also needs to expand her subject pool.

Sommers' final accusation is that "most teachers' comments are not text-specific and could be interchanged, rubber-stamped, from text to text" (152). She argues that teacher commentary is so vague that it wouldn't matter which text it is slapped upon, it will make just as much (or little, she adds) sense. Sommers concludes with simply identifying a need for appropriate and process-oriented commenting styles to truly improve student writing, with which I agree. Teaching students that writing is a process and not a product is a step towards teaching students how to be writers. In regards to her "rubber-stamp" idea, perhaps the teachers who are writing the same comments such as "think more about your audience" might perhaps indicate a need for that teacher to reteach the concept of audience awareness as opposed to falling prey to lazy commentary.

Ultimately, I found this piece to be interesting yet weak. While it is true that we need a stronger focus on process as opposed to product, I did not find the statements she makes about teacher commentary, most of which were basic generalities, to be true in a hard-and-fast sense. She seems to either suggest that teachers are becoming more like computers (which speaks to me about the state of assessing and education in general as opposed to strictly composition instruction) or that computers can do the job better than what is being done now ("The sharp contrast between the teachers' comments and those of the computer highlighted how arbitrary and idiosyncratic most of our teachers' comments are. Besides, the calm, reasonable language of the computer provided quite a contrast to the hostility and mean-spiritedness of most of the teachers' comments" (149).). I am put off by both and she lost this reader early in her paper with that implication.