Written Commentary

            After reading McGlaun’s article “Reflections on Teacher Comments: Lessons from the Tutorial” I cannot help but think about teacher comments on essays and my own experiences with them.  At this point I can think about essay comments from a couple of points of view; comments from teachers in high school and now a number of professors in college, trying to write my own comments for this class, and observing appointments at the Writing Center. To some extent, I am questioning how valuable these comments even are.

            The comments I remember most from high school came from only two teachers.  One taught me how to use a semi-colon, which for some reason teachers had neglected to explain up until my sophomore year. He saved me from a bad run-on sentence habit but he did so by leaving a bright yellow folder about punctuation, the semi-colon edition, on my desk in class. I imagine he followed up by commenting on my use in future writing but that is less memorable.  My other teacher had a somewhat unconventional practice of keeping a tally on his rubric of how many times passive voice, and other pet peeves of his, appeared in the graded paper. I do think that this helped me become a better writer, especially because it made me conscious of particular aspects of writing, but again it was not exactly teacher comments in the traditional sense.

            Thus far in college none of my professors have made much of an impression on me through their comments. I tend to remember them as easy or tough graders but I am unable to recall many specific comments that made me change my writing or drew much of a reaction from me at all.

            Now that I am taking this class and observing at the Writing Center I am markedly more aware of written comments. I have discovered from trying to write comments on papers that it can be rather difficult to strike the right balance but what I have also discovered is that being at the Writing Center and being able to talk to the writer in person seems to be a much more productive and valuable activity.

            I suppose it is my own fault for not putting my teacher’s comments to better use, maybe I just need to stop being lazy, but I tend not to be significantly impacted by what they write on my papers.  I read comments over when I get a paper back, consider what they say, check the grade, and if I am satisfied with it I pretty much forget about it. I find that I do not have the time to pain over what a teacher writes on my paper and apparently I do not have too much space left in my head to store their comments. Unless a comment is specific and clear and I feel that it is a worthwhile suggestion or correction, I tend not to worry about it.  I cross the paper off my to-do list and at best I might glance at it again when I have another paper to write for that professor.

            This all makes me wonder if it is just me or if there is something slightly useless about written paper commentary. The verbal activity that takes place at the Writing Center seems to be many times more productive than a few sentences written at the end of a paper. Also, McGlaun’s comments about students not being able to read tone and her attempt to tape record her paper grading process make me think that there might be a better way, and that the way might be through a simple face-to-face interaction.

Another visit to the Writing Center

            When I visited the Writing Center this week to observe my consultant both she and the other consultant had appointments.  This was interesting to me because the week before they had been talking about how few appointments they were having and I had been wondering about it but I imagine the semester is picking up and students are starting to have more work.  I was somewhat reassured of the Writing Center’s usefulness after seeing that there were actually two students who had come in.

            So, I observed my consultant’s appointment and that was an interesting experience for me too.  My consultant said that it was a very good paper and so she did not have that much to correct in it.  She didn’t make too many comments during the appointment but I observed that her technique is to give small comments to the student as she goes along and I think she did a better job reading the paper because she was interacting with the writer while she did it.

            At the end of the appointment I asked my consultant a few questions about what her other appointments had been like lately because so far I have seen two students come in with good papers that did not need that many corrections.  I was surprised that she said she actually has had a couple of difficult appointments recently.  One student came in with a paper that just was not very good and was poorly organized and another student came to the appointment thinking that the consultant was going to fix her paper for her.  While we have talked about these types of students coming to appointments in class, the existence of such students became more real when I heard of actual situations involving them and now I realize more that I will probably encounter those students myself.

First Visit to the Writing Center

            On Tuesday I went to observe at the Writing Center for the first time.  I had never actually been before and I was somewhat surprised.  I had expected it to be bigger and more of an office type of setting but I liked that it felt more comfortable and personal than that.  The fact that it was a small room with just students sitting together at a table made it feel more like letting a friend read over a paper than going to an official appointment.  I think that students are probably pleased and perhaps relieved when they see that the Writing Center is somewhere that they can feel comfortable going to.  Maybe if more students realized what appointments are actually like they would be more inclined to go.

            The consultant that I was supposed to be observing did not actually have an appointment while I was there but the other consultant did so I just sat in and observed his appointment instead.  Another student was also observing so we ended up having five people involved in the appointment.  I thought that it would be more official than it was; in some ways I felt like I was simply chatting with other students, mostly about academic things, but at the same time the student who came in ended up with a corrected paper.  Although I do not think the student was too self-conscious about having her paper edited I think she still probably felt more comfortable in the relaxed atmosphere in which her paper was reviewed than she would have in the setting I had imagined.  I think the consultant did a good job of making the student feel good about her appointment because he acted like a peer and talked to her first instead of immediately sitting down and reading her paper.  I think that she left feeling that her appointment had been helpful rather than that she had gone somewhere and been criticized.  Overall I left with a positive impression of what the Writing Center is like.