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Using the NHR Index

Writing Between The Lines:
Commenting on Student Work

by Michael J. Cripps

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	Commenting on student papers is hard work. Part of what makes commenting hard is the fact that the instructor must simultaneously help the student develop as a writer and grade her writing. While the instructor experiences considerable overlap between these two tasks, the student typically has real difficulty reading evaluative comments as instructional opportunities. Novice instructors often aim comments in one of two directions, both of which tend to privilege evaluation over instruction. One approach focuses on either the basic writing weaknesses (surface error), the overall structure and position of the essay, or both. While these issues are important in evaluating a student's essay, the approach is of limited use for the student in need of specific writing tools. Other novice instructors comment exhaustively on an essay in an effort both to justify an eventual grade and to locate the writing weaknesses so the student can recognize them. Students, perhaps not surprisingly, tend to read comprehensive comments as evaluative and never actually locate and prioritize the instructional moments. The instructor begins to navigate the tension between evaluation and instruction when he treats comments as textual interventions. A comment becomes a textual intervention when the writing instructor steps into the student's essay and invites her to pause and consider the ideas or skills on display at a moment in the essay. When the instructor both comments on a writing weakness at a specific point in an essay and also points toward a concrete remedy for the weakness he invites the student to reflect on how she can actually improve her writing. This two-fold approach can help the student focus her attention on the learning opportunities in an instructor's comments, particularly if the textual interventions are targeted at those thinking and writing skills that make for an effective essay. Just what are these thinking and writing skills, and how can the writing instructor appropriately target interventions in student writing?

Modes of Textual Intervention	Comments on a student's essay can be divided into two categories, conceptual and mechanical (see "Types and Levels of Textual Intervention," below). Within each of these categories of textual intervention one can focus particular comments at one of three levels of an essay. Often, these three levels are identifiable as the sentence, the paragraph, and the essay as a whole. While this demarcation of the terrain in an essay is fairly effective, a more useful way to describe these levels comes from the language of political economy. One can direct comments (conceptual or mechanical) at the micro, the meso, or the macro level of a student's essay. This division recognizes that interventions can transcend the sentence, or even the paragraph. Conceptual comments speak to the ideas in a student's essay, or to the relationship the student attempts to establish between her ideas and ideas in the works cited in the essay. A principal goal in writing instruction is to encourage increasingly nuanced positions articulated in relation to complex ideas in the readings. The student will require guidance at all levels of the essay if she is to develop this ability. Since she is unable to work on this nuance at all levels simultaneously, the writing instructor must focus conceptual comments at specific levels. Mechanical or skills-based comments speak to particular techniques in an essay. Is the essay organized? Do the paragraphs relate to one another? Are the sentences grammatically correct? But comments such as, "disorganized," or "poor sentence structure," do little more than point out problems in an essay. The writing instructor's responsibility includes assistance on solutions. Writing instruction demands that one intervene in a student's paper in ways that help her overcome her difficulties on these (and other) mechanical fronts. While this essay disentangles the relationship between ideas and their articulation on paper, it is important to recognize the intimate relationship between concepts and mechanics in a student's essay.
	Types and Levels of Textual Intervention
		Skills/Mechanics	Conceptual
	Macro Level	Organization of Essay Clarity of Thesis/Position	Content of Thesis/Position Relationship between Position and Texts (including Partial Readings)
	Meso Level	Transitions Between Paragraphs Position and Topic Sentences Use of Quotes Types of Quotes/Text Selection	Key Idea in Paragraph Relation Between Ideas in Different Paragraphs Explanation of Relation Between Quotes or Between Idea and Quotes
	Micro Level	Patterns of Error Integration of Quotation	Explanation of Quotes Reading Comprehension Writing From One's Position?

Macro Level Comments	Macro level interventions speak to the essay as a whole. They result from an examination of a student's project and the extent to which she has realized it. What is the student attempting to say in the essay? Is it possible to discern a project, position or thesis in the essay? The novice writer often lacks a clear thesis statement in the introduction, or shifts her position as the essay unfolds. This is not surprising since it is difficult to develop a clear thesis statement when one confronts complex readings, must comprehend them without much assistance from others, and is writing to fulfill an assignment. While it is helpful to comment on the lack of a clear thesis when it is missing, a comment such as, "no clear thesis or position statement in this introduction," is of little help unless it is also linked to a comment (often later in the essay) that helps the student locate the position implicitly (or semi-explicitly) articulated in the essay. This set of comments encourages the student to read the interventions as learning moments and helps point out the value of revision. A good place to hunt for a potential thesis is in the student's final paragraph(s) since novice writers often write to discover what they think about an issue. Pairing a "lack of thesis" comment to a "thesis found here" comment and suggesting a technique for moving the found thesis to the introduction is an effective way to teach the student that the conclusion to a draft is a fruitful place to hunt for a position or thesis. This learning directly challenges most students' conceptions of thesis construction, forcing them to reexamine much of what they take the writing process to involve. Students are accustomed either to inventing or to being given a thesis that they then support. Neither approach to a thesis prepares students for the idea that one discovers a thesis by writing, and then re-writes to develop, articulate, and possibly modify that thesis. When the writing instructor helps a student see the value of a draft as a guidepost for a revision that yields a stronger position articulated earlier in the essay, the student learns an important lesson about the drafting process. Another macro level intervention a writing instructor makes involves the relationship between the student's position and ideas in the readings. Students have difficulty balancing the requirement of an "independent position" with the demand for "engagement with the readings." It is helpful to think about the relationship between these two requirements with conversation as a model. While interlocutors have their own positions on a particular issue (or issues), the act of conversation requires that they articulate their positions in relation to those held by others in the conversation. One is not really engaged in conversation if one merely repeats the ideas articulated by others in the conversation. And there is no conversation if the relation one's ideas and the interlocutors' ideas goes unexplored or undeveloped. Often, this writing technique is best taught through meso level comments that help the student work out techniques for navigating the tension between engagement and conversation. It is not easy for the novice writer to compose an essay in which he articulates a point of view in relation to the readings. This task is greatly simplified when the student ignores or overlooks the complexity in the readings. Not surprisingly, students first experience success articulating their position in relation to ideas in the readings by focusing on sections of the readings and working with the simpler ideas. One important technique to encourage more complete (and complex) readings involves considering the impact an overlooked section of a reading would have on the student's point. A marginal comment that directs the student to a specific passage and asks the student to consider its implications for his position demonstrates the value of more nuanced arguments. As the student builds more complexity into his position through more complete engagement with the readings, he will likely face difficulties organizing the elements of that position. A student with a nuanced position who attempts to locate relationships between his position and the readings will need to be very careful with organization if the ideas are not to appear muddled. This is where the writing instructor can be enormously helpful. Perhaps points and ideas needed on page two do not appear until page four or five. Comments pointing out a path to effective reorganization can help the student revise. One such technique involves mapping the paragraphs and ideas in an essay and examining whether they are presented in an order that makes sense as the essay unfolds.

Meso Level Comments	Meso level comments are a mainstay of textual intervention. Whether the writing instructor focuses on work with quotation within a paragraph or the relationship between ideas in different paragraphs, student essays succeed or fail largely because of what takes place at the middle level of the paper. Two issues in particular are important to look for when considering meso level interventions, the student's articulation of key ideas and the extent to which those ideas are related to ideas or concepts in the readings. The student who writes from her position while relating that position to relevant ideas in the readings is effectively engaged in a scholarly conversation, and is producing college-level writing. One of the first areas the writing instructor should focus on in assessing an essay concerns the use of text. There are at least two main uses for text, conceptual and evidentiary, and the ability to recognize the difference between them is an important skill to work on in the writing classroom. Conceptual quotes help the student develop his ideas by enabling the student to demarcate both associations with and boundaries between his ideas and those of others. While a student's ideas can often be strengthened by this kind of engagement, the ideas are often articulated without such an engagement (recall the tension between independence and engagement). It is important to encourage the student to include conceptual quotes where the student's own ideas could be strengthened and developed by such engagement. In practice, this sort of intervention takes place in a marginal comment that both identifies the student's idea (located in a particular sentence or two) and suggests an opportunity for connection by mentioning a potentially appropriate concept (or concepts) from the readings. An evidence quote provides important information about the issue at stake in the essay. Evidence quotes help a student support his position. While evidence quotes often lack conceptual weight, they are very useful as supporting material for a student's point. It is important for the writing instructor to intervene in a student's essay with a comment on the use of evidence when the student's main idea in a paragraph would benefit from the incorporation of factual information or an example from one of the readings. The most effective mechanical comments on the use of evidence quotes both suggest an appropriate passage and explain just why such a quote will help support the student's idea or point in the paragraph. Many novice instructors, when intervening at the level of the paragraph (or between paragraphs), focus attention on both the central idea in a paragraph and the relationship between the ideas in multiple paragraphs. Individual paragraphs are generally about a particular point or idea, and an effective essay usually links a number of these individual paragraphs into a larger position or argument. For this reason, comments on the importance of topic sentences and the organization of paragraphs are significant textual interventions. As with other comments, assertions that the student should "work on organization" or that he needs "topic sentences" speak more to evaluation than intervention and do little to point the student in the right direction. It is likely that the student who needs to work on organization does not yet understand how to produce an organized essay. Comments that help a student work on organization and the presence of a central idea within each paragraph begin by looking at the text the student has produced. The writing instructor can often find a central idea buried toward the bottom of the paragraph. An effective textual intervention will identify that idea for the student and point out how moving it to the front of the paragraph can make it an organizing idea. This kind of conceptual comment can easily be linked to a skills-centered comment that stresses the importance of a topic sentence. When the student begins to construct paragraphs with topic sentences that identify her main point in the paragraph, and the paragraph as a whole demonstrates effective engagement with either conceptual or evidence readings (or both), the student will be writing from her position. Related to this conceptual intervention are skills-based interventions that direct the student to consider transitions between paragraphs. Like textual interventions focused on topic sentences and organization, a marginal comment on transitional sentences is most effective when it both targets a specific relationship between two paragraphs and suggests the sort of transition that can work. An end comment on the necessity of "transitions" between paragraphs is largely ineffective unless it directs the student back to a specific moment (or moments) in the essay where a transition is important, or juxtaposes an effective transitional moment with an area where a transition is either absent or ineffective.

Micro Level Comments	The distinction between mechanical and conceptual comments is perhaps most clear at the micro level. A comment that directs the student to a reading comprehension weakness in an explanation of a quote obviously speaks to the issue of ideas or concepts. The student who fails to grasp the most basic concepts in the readings needs to do more conceptual work if he is to write an effective essay. Alternatively, a comment on a pattern of subject-verb agreement errors speaks directly to the mechanics of a sentence. Since the sentence is the basic building block of the essay, a student whose essays consistently fall short on either of these micro level issues requires significant intervention on the part of the writing instructor. The sheer complexity of the readings ensures that reading comprehension will be a challenge for every student. Requiring complete comprehension in advance of drafting is unnecessarily intimidating for students, overly burdensome on the instructor who feels pressure to lecture students on the material, and misguided when examined against the record of the writing process. Writers frequently write before they fully understand an issue. Good writers push themselves to understand more as they write, and continue to revise and improve their understanding after they have written. Still, the instructor must both encourage and demand improved understanding. Much of this encouragement takes place at the meso level with comments on the student’s ideas and the relationship between those ideas and concepts in the readings. At the micro level, this encouragement often takes the form of a negative. Textual interventions that surface a serious misreading of a particular passage by pointing out a disjuncture between a quote and the student’s interpretation are an important way to help her improve reading comprehension. Comments that push the student to explain difficult conceptual quotes encourage her to devote attention to reading comprehension. Another important micro level conceptual comment directs attention to the student’s voice. Stronger essays do more than articulate a position or point of view; they are written from that position or point of view. In helping the student more effectively write from his position, the writing instructor’s comments begin to blur the analytic distinction between mechanical and conceptual comments. A rewrite of a particular sentence (or pair of sentences) that foregrounds the student’s position often involves more effective integration of quotation. Sometimes a student’s position is obscured by the presence of a block quote that does little to either develop or support the position. On a basic level, the student might resort to block quotes because he does not know how to write a sentence that includes both his position and a brief quote from a reading. Perhaps the position only emerges after the quotation, and so appears as a reaction to the idea in the quote. Textual interventions that help the student improve his ability to make tactical decisions regarding the selection, use, and presentation of quotes can dramatically improve the student’s ability to write from his position. The final important textual interventions on the micro level mechanics of a student essay are comments that point out grammar and syntax errors. The initial tendency is to dive into the essay with a red pen and begin correcting punctuation, spelling, and grammatical errors. The writing instructor must resist this tendency, primarily because it is counterproductive. Correcting grammatical mistakes in a draft does little to help the student recognize the source of the mistakes or prevent them in the future. The most effective (and least onerous) technique for commenting on surface error is to look for patterns of error. Once the writing instructor identifies subject-verb agreement weaknesses, for example, she can begin to help the student overcome these weaknesses. A good rule of thumb is to limit correction to the first page, or the first two paragraphs. This intervention is generally sufficient to identify one or more patterns of error in an essay. An end comment can briefly identify these weaknesses for the student and direct her to focus attention on one (or more) of the patterns. Visits to office hours and directed rewriting of particular sentences or paragraphs can often yield dramatic improvements in sentence-level mechanics. A student whose writing exhibits multiple patterns of surface error and serious reading comprehension weaknesses needs more assistance than the writing instructor can provide in a course. This student is a strong candidate for additional tutoring in a writing center. An essay with grammar and/or punctuation errors that fail to conform to patterns is usually a sign of either carelessness or misplacement in a freshman-writing course. If the problem is carelessness, a discussion with the student about college-level writing expectations can often rectify the situation. If the problem is misplacement, the student will likely need to be moved to a developmental writing course.

Conclusion	Writing instruction over the course of a semester is a process. Students can and do develop over time. This is what makes writing instruction such a rewarding teaching experience. With an entire semester to work on micro, meso, and macro level conceptual and mechanical weaknesses, one is tempted to focus comments on one level or type of weakness, and bring in others over the term. This approach is a mistake. While these modes of intervention may be analytically distinct, they are deeply interwoven in the writing process. Students must simultaneously make progress at multiple levels. Still, it is important for the writing instructor to use the process-oriented focus of the writing classroom to advantage in considering textual interventions. Reading comprehension, the uses and types of textual reference, and development of position are perhaps the first set of competencies to work on. Surface error can be addressed alongside efforts to help the student enter a conversation with the readings. As a student’s writing improves, comments directed at the development of a thesis statement, relationships between paragraphs, and efforts to write from one’s position become more important. Of course, one must assess each individual student’s work. It is important to limit interventions because many students have difficulty reading comments as constructive. A good rule of thumb is two significant marginal comments per page. More than three interventions on a page tends to overwhelm the student, and a page with no comments is a missed opportunity. Even if a page exhibits no weaknesses, it is likely to contain strengths that can be identified as instructional moments for the student. If a concrete instance of the solution exists elsewhere in the student’s essay, it is very productive to direct the student to that area for comparison. This linking enables the instructor to evaluate while foregrounding the instructional opportunities for the student. An end comment in the form of a brief letter to the student is very effective, particularly if the instructor is careful not to write it as a justification for the grade on the paper. Students tend to turn immediately to the end of the essay to locate their grade, making an end comment the first text the student actually encounters. If it is written as a justification for the grade the student will have real trouble locating the instructional opportunities in the comments. Fortunately, an instructional end comment is relatively easy to draft. The instructor can review the marginal comments and locate three or four significant conceptual and/or mechanical writing issues. It is relatively easy to prioritize these areas for improvement, and to direct the student back into her text for examples of the issue. This approach to end comments helps the student see the textual interventions as instructional, and can point the way to more effective writing. With these modes and principles of textual intervention in hand, effective commenting on student essays becomes a matter of diligence and practice. No two instructors intervene in a student’s essay exactly the same way, and the same instructor will likely choose to highlight different areas of a student’s essay in different readings.


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