Getting back a paper full of negative instructor comments can be demoralizing for students.

Positive Spin

It’s easy to find what’s wrong with your students’ writing and harder to find what’s right. But focusing on what students are doing well may ultimately be more useful in helping them to improve.

From grade school on, most of the feedback students receive on their writing focuses on what they’ve done wrong: spelling errors, comma mistakes, vague wording, awkward sentences, rambling paragraphs. They may see the occasional “Nice!” or “Good example” in the margins, but most writing teachers focus on what they think needs “fixing.” As a result, students often approach a writing assignment feeling defeated before they even begin. They’re like dogs that have been kicked by a previous owner; they’re wary and worn down.

The implications of that are significant. Imagine you’re trying to learn—at someone else’s insistence—something you find difficult, say, playing cricket or knitting an afghan. Imagine that most of the feedback you get from your instructor (or superior) is negative: “No, that’s wrong.” Or maybe at the end of every session you receive an assessment (“C-”) and only a word or two of explanation: “Sloppy work!” How eager would you be to keep making an effort?

That’s not too far from the way we try to teach writing. We offer students little chance to practice, and our reaction to their work is mostly negative. If that approach doesn’t seem to be working, maybe it’s time to change how you respond to student writing.

Offer students specific praise whenever you can do so honestly. Students find detailed feedback more credible and more helpful: “I found the research you cited on page 2 persuasive.”

Be leery of “but.” Faculty often try to blunt negative comments with token praise, a tactic students see right through. A comment like “You started off well, but failed to meet the goal of the assignment” isn’t really a compliment.

Listen to what students have to say. Put the need to evaluate aside, at least initially, and respond to your students’ words as a reader first. Tell them not only where their writing confuses you, but also where it holds your interest.

Ask students to reflect on their own work. Have students write a brief reaction to their work when they submit it. If they already know their conclusion is weak, you might not need to point it out.

Include praise in peer response. When students read their peers’ work, ask them to identify the most persuasive sentence, the most interesting paragraph, or the idea most worth expanding.

Ask questions. Rather than making comments, pose questions that encourage students to think about their subject more deeply. Remember: responses, whether in the form of questions or comments, are best offered on drafts, so students have a chance to consider them as they revise.

Write your comments on a separate sheet or rubric. Avoid writing directly on your students’ paper. This is a radical notion, but one that can transform how you read student work. Writing all over your students’ papers is a bit like interrupting them in conversation. They’re trying to tell you what they understand about the Renaissance or crustaceans, and you keep jumping in to criticize: “Wordy!”

ldquo;Awkward!” If you feel that you need to comment on specific sentence-level issues, have students insert line numbers—easily done on the computer—so you can refer quickly to a particular sentence.

Confining your comments to a separate place will also make you less likely to correct every error, which does little to help students make fewer mistakes in the future.

Even simply pointing out every error can be detrimental, though, since it takes the focus off of other writing concerns that may ultimately be more significant.

When you return a paper with all sorts of surface errors marked, you’re sending the message that correctness is what matters most. Of course, correctness does matter, but good writing is not only error-free. It’s also thoughtful, engaging, logical, amusing, persuasive, and/or informative. After all, when you come across a journal article you want to share with colleagues, you don’t say, “Take a look at this article. It’s surprisingly free of errors!”

So, what should you do about errors? You might comment only on patterns of errors, discuss common errors in class, offer handouts on recurring problems, or ask students to help each other proofread.

Whatever method you choose, try to direct most of your attention not to the misspelled words, but rather to the meaning those imperfect words are trying to convey. Putting meaning ahead of mistakes may ultimately be the most important thing you can do to make writing a more positive experience for you and your students.

At the writing center we’ve learned that students benefit from discussing writing with their peers.

Working at the University Writing Center is like seeing the state of writing at Texas A&M through a wide-angle lens.

We conduct more than 5,400 consultations a year with students at all levels—from freshmen to doctoral candidates—who come from all colleges and departments. We help with everything from English 104 papers to wildlife management plans.

As we work with your students on the writing you’ve assigned—as we question, advise, cajole, and cheer them—they are teaching us as much about writing as we are teaching them.

Some of what we’ve learned from our work might surprise you.

Talking about writing helps.

The cornerstone of the UWC philosophy is that talking about writing helps writers improve, even if the person listening is not an expert on the subject matter. Over and over our experiences in consultations prove that moving back and forth between speech and writing not only improves the quality of the assignment at hand, but also helps writers become more confident and self-aware.

One part of our job as consultants is to act almost like stenographers, parroting back what students say in the course of a session. It’s a matter of helping them translate from a quick and familiar mode of discourse (speech) to a more deliberate and less practiced mode (writing.)

It’s surprising how often in the course of a consultation students will say out loud the exact words they’ve been struggling to put on paper.  It’s often the high point of a session. The consultant points to a garbled passage and says, “What are you trying to say here?” The student starts in, describing the ideas he or she had in mind and eventually says aloud the words that were so elusive in the writing process.

When the consultant repeats the sentence back, the student is astonished to find the words were there all along, waiting to be discovered.

Hard work doesn’t always translate into good writing.

Consultants often feel a palpable sense of frustration from writers who are on their third or fourth draft but still can’t write the paper they know their instructor expects of them. Quite simply, some students come to Texas A&M with inferior writing skills, deficits that can’t be overcome in a semester or two—and certainly not in a 45-minute consultation. Consultants know it’s impossible to tell how much effort has gone into a paper merely from the way it sounds.

Sitting side by side in a five-foot by seven-foot consultation room, consultants can’t help but sympathize with students who are putting forth maximum effort, yet still falling short of their mark. When UWC Consultant Melissa Carlsen describes her worst session ever, it’s not one with an uncooperative or hostile student, but rather one where, even after 45 minutes of intense effort, the determined student still couldn’t convey his ideas.

Luckily, most of our students do make progress, and we celebrate all of their hard-won victories, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

You say “error.” We say “stylistic preference.”

Jordan Fisher, an undergraduate writing consultant, recalls working with a student who said his professor had forbidden his students to use any introductory clauses or phrases in their papers, because he felt today’s students rely on them excessively.

Other professors consider the split infinitive to be the gravest of writing sins, even though grammarians have been arguing over whether it constitutes an error since at least the 1920s and the venerable Oxford English Dictionary has pronounced it acceptable. (Still other professors couldn’t identify a split infinitive if their tenure depended on it.)

Literature professors prefer everything written in present tense, while historians use past tense. Some disciplines forbid passive voice; others all but insist upon it.

Students, baffled by the seeming randomness of these distinctions, tend to gravitate to the extremes, either ignoring the “rules” completely or adhering to them slavishly in all situations, like the students who write personal statements without using the pronoun “I.” The reason? A high school teacher once told them the first-person pronoun was too informal for “good writing.”

Consultants, meanwhile, believe that good writing is writing that meets the needs of its audience, which is why they commit this line to memory: “There is no set rule on that; you’d better ask your instructor.”

Students can (and do) learn to correct their surface errors.

Research in composition shows that most direct grammar instruction fails to reduce students’ rate of error. The one exception is instruction given at “point of need.” In other words, grammar is best taught when students are smack in the middle of the writing process, which makes consultations fertile ground for impromptu grammar lessons conducted by peer consultants.

We see it every day: The consultant points out the missing apostrophe in a possessive, and two or three lines later, the student corrects another possessive without prompting.  At other times, students stop and ask us, “Shouldn’t there be a comma here?”

It’s not that students don’t care about grammar and punctuation; it’s just that the rules are voluminous, variable, and confusing, and the window of opportunity for teaching those rules is narrow.

Some students also have to unlearn habits they’ve picked up along the way. “I never know where the commas go,” a student will say, “so I try not to use any.”

At that point, the consultant reaches for the UWC handout on commas, explains the rule involved in that particular sentence, and tries to convince the student that punctuation is not the enemy.

International students are often better writers than they (or you) may realize.

Many English as a Second Language (ESL) students have an extensive knowledge of grammar—often more than their instructors. What these students don’t have is a command of idiomatic English. They may not know, for instance, whether to use “the” or “a” before a noun, or they may be confused about why we might say we’re “immersed in” a topic but not “immersed into” it—even though we might “dive into” that same subject.

With every sentence they write, ESL students must navigate rules a native speaker doesn’t even realize exist.

These students can also be hampered by their limited English vocabulary. Mark Twain once said “the difference between the almost right word and the right word” was “the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.” When ESL students don’t know the English word they’re looking for—the one perfect word to convey their precise meaning—their idea, no matter how insightful, is as good as lost, destined to be either misunderstood or ignored.

At the UWC we find that what ESL students need most is reassurance. They need to be reminded that the subtleties of idiomatic English and a richer vocabulary will come to them with time and effort. As Emily Richter, an undergraduate consultant, says of working with international students, “If you take the time to look past their surface errors, you’ll usually see the content is all there.”

Students need to learn time management as much as they need to learn grammar.

One of the first questions a consultant is likely to ask during a session is “When is this due?” Unfortunately, the answer is often given in hours, rather than days.

When consultants walk out of their sessions muttering that there wasn’t much they could accomplish since the client’s paper was due in 30 minutes, they sound for all the world like weary instructors bemoaning the sorry state of students today.

Working at the writing center makes us believe in the power of multiple drafts. We see how writing improves when students have the opportunity to leave it and come back later with fresh perspective.

We hope that someday students will learn to leave extra time for revising, editing,  and proofreading, but until they do, requiring preliminary drafts greatly improves the chance that their writing (and thinking) will be better.

Even our own consultants, who see the value of revision firsthand every day, sometimes need to be coerced into producing drafts. They are, after all, students and therefore not immune from the typical student demons of procrastination and over-scheduling.  Consultant Melissa Carlsen, for instance, admits to writing many of her papers just in the nick of time, but remembers one occasion when she was required to produce a rough draft.

“It was the best paper I ever did,” she concedes.

Writing helps students learn.

We see our share of disgruntled and apathetic students at the UWC. But the great majority of our clients are willing to put forth tremendous effort on their writing. As they work, they are engaged and focused.

Walking by a consultation room and seeing two students—one consultant and one UWC client—bent head-to-head over an essay on the Manhattan Project, discussing anything from the use of semicolons to the discovery of plutonium, can go a long way to further your faith in the power of learning.

UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester urges instructors to assign more writing in all courses, not just Ws. Students need the practice, and writing will also help them engage more deeply with their subject matter.

When I hear W course instructors express frustration over students’ lack of basic writing skills, I am sympathetic. Students in a W course should already know how to write a well-formed sentence within a well-formed paragraph; how to adapt their style and arguments to a general, educated reader; how to organize an academic essay or research paper; and how to cite scholarly sources.

So why, if our students have taken foundational writing courses (here or elsewhere), do they often seem unable to handle the basics? There are many possible reasons, but part of the problem is surely that students need more opportunities to practice what they’ve learned.

By the time students reach a W or C course, they have taken one required basic college writing course (or received credit for a high school course), so they should be prepared for upper-level writing. The problem is that we expect them to retain all they have learned in an early course and transfer that knowledge to a new kind of discipline-specific writing a few years later. That’s unrealistic. Students need frequent opportunities to apply their knowledge; learning to communicate effectively takes practice.

There is a core assumption operating behind the W or C course graduation requirement: although many communication skills are general and universal, others are more specialized and discipline-specific, and students must develop both. W and C courses focus on those more specialized skills, the ones that faculty deem important for students in their field to master as they move on to graduate studies or the workplace. These courses should also give students an opportunity to apply their previously acquired knowledge of writing, but they are not the optimum venue for teaching foundational skills.

We’ve made progress with W courses; they underscore the importance of writing and ensure that our students write at least 2,000 words per W class. But 4,000 words total over two courses really isn’t much when it comes to mastering something as complex as writing.

The results of the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement show our first year students write less than students at ten similar institutions, including the University of Texas, Ohio State, and Purdue. Our seniors are close to the bottom as well.

While we have increased our writing instruction over the past seven years, so have other universities, as they, too, have recognized the truth of what Richard Light, professor in the School of Education and John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, wrote in the journal Peer Review in 2003: “The relationship between the amount of writing for a course and students’ level of engagement is stronger than the relationship between students’ engagement and any other course characteristic.” Further, the students Light interviewed for his research reported that they weren’t motivated to take writing seriously until they were asked in their junior or senior courses to write about their major.

It is time for us to consider writing from a longitudinal and curricular perspective. We need to stop thinking of writing as a hurdle to get past and see it instead as integral to student learning.

Our undergraduates should write more frequent and longer papers in more classes, W or not, and they should use writing to share ideas, solve problems, explain their thinking, and reflect on their learning. Not a semester should go by when students write fewer than eight pages, even in the sciences, and preferably more in other areas.

Writing instruction is not someone else’s responsibility, and we must not consider the job done simply because students have completed the minimum requirements. Texas A&M cannot abdicate the responsibility for teaching students to communicate effectively in a wide variety of circumstances and for all kinds of audiences. Wherever and however our students have been schooled in the foundational courses, it is our responsibility to build on that foundation and push our students to use their skills at the highest levels.

Karen-Beth Scholthof uses literature and art to teach students about the human cost of disease.

Science professor experiments with writing

Karen-Beth Scholthof, a professor in the Department of Plant Pathology and Microbiology, has won the 2008 W Course Teaching Award for her work in the course, “Pathogens, the Environment, and Society.” The $3,000 award, presented to Scholthof last November, recognized her spirit of innovation and unwavering commitment to improving her students’ writing.

Students in her course learn not only about the science behind some of history’s most notorious epidemics, but also—through Scholthof’s use of relevant fiction and poetry—discover the human consequences of these outbreaks.

The course’s heavy emphasis on reading and writing may be unusual for a science class, but the combination comes naturally to Scholthof.

“I don’t know any other way to teach,” she says, pointing to her own eclectic reading tastes and noting that even before the advent of W courses, she always assigned writing.

“I’m not interested in exams,” she says. “I don’t see the sense in rote memorization. I want my students to gain confidence that they have opinions and can defend their point of view.”

Scholthof finds students often lack that confidence and have genuine anxiety about writing. She tries to lessen their fear by making the first assignment worth only a few points and limiting it to 500 words.

She also works hard to earn their trust. She reads and comments on everything they write, including journal assignments they complete in class. As she reads, Scholthof marks errors, offers comments, asks questions, compliments good ideas, and even recommends additional reading students might enjoy. In essence, she treats each student as she might treat a valued colleague. It’s an approach that takes some students by surprise.

“I had one student who looked at his paper and said, ‘Wow, you actually read this.’ And I said, ‘Well, you wrote it, so why wouldn’t I read it?’” she recalls, laughing.

Scholthof isn’t the only one reading each student’s paper, though:  after considering the idea for several semesters, Scholthof decided to add peer review to her course.

“I was reluctant to give up my lecture time,” she admits, but she now sees it differently.

“By the end of the course, the students had completely bought into the peer review process and were going on about how great it was,” she says.  “Some of them were actually doing extra peer review, having their roommates read their work if they missed a session.”

During peer review, students read their paper aloud to two of their classmates. At one point Scholthof made reading aloud optional, but some students complained, saying that reading out loud was especially useful because it allowed them to hear problems they wouldn’t catch otherwise.  When Scholthof’s students submit their final drafts, they also turn in a paragraph discussing how they’ve responded to their peers’ advice.

Now that she’s sold on peer review, Scholthof is contemplating additional changes to the course, including a possible wiki assignment. She compares refining the course to her work as a scientist.

“In the lab, you sometimes get surprising results, and that’s the direction you go,” she says. “You can’t stay locked in to just one idea.”

Assistant Professor Ginger Carney shares her insights about writing

When Assistant Professor Ginger Carney tells her biology students that writing will be important in their future careers, she’s speaking from experience. Carney became a biologist because she loved science, but she soon found she was spending more than half of her time writing.  That’s why, when she came to the biology department at Texas A&M four and a half years ago, she agreed to teach the department’s first W course, “Critical Writing in Biology.”

It would seem she’s doing something right: this past fall Carney received the Center for Teaching Excellence 25th Anniversary W Course Award for teaching. The award, presented at a ceremony in her department, included a $1,500 prize.

Carney spends so much time writing that grammar reference books occupy a prime place on her bookshelf: “When I’m writing a new proposal or a paper, I almost always have one of them open on my desk, so I can check those little things we all forget.”

She tries to be careful and deliberate in everything she writes, even emails, because she believes her writing plays a crucial role in how others perceive her work. As Carney puts it, “Who is going to fund my research if I can’t motivate someone to be interested in it or explain why it’s important?”

One of Carney’s first goals for the undergraduates in her W classes is to get them to start writing like scientists, and that means teaching them to be direct and concise.

“Students produce a lot of ‘fluffy’ writing for the first assignment, whereas scientists prefer to just say it. Scientists get the information out there without elaborating,” says Carney. To help her students recognize that flowery language can be distracting, Carney uses a Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) assignment that asks them to read and respond to three essays, one of which, Carney says, “sounds really smart, but doesn’t make a lick of sense.” In discussing the essays, her students begin to appreciate simple, straightforward prose.

Another of Carney’s goals is teaching students to write within a set word limit, an important skill for budding scientists who might someday need to write grant proposals. She gives them a list of deadwood phrases to avoid and encourages them to weed out repetitions.

Carney assigns the class three graded CPR assignments, but before each of those her students produce a related journal entry. The students then take that  through a peer review process, which begins with reading their work aloud to a partner. With as many as 80 students in a section, that’s a noisy proposition, but Carney is determined to stick with it. Her students, though, tend to be skeptical: “They feel strange about reading out loud and look at me like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me.’”  Their reluctance fades quickly, though, when they see how useful reading aloud can be in helping them find their own surface errors.

Of course, there are often far more errors than Carney would like. One of her frustrations with teaching a W course is that it isn’t possible to provide all the writing instruction some students may need, but, as she sees it, “I’m not here to teach composition. I’m not going to teach them when to use a semicolon. But I will direct them to places where they can get help with that if they need it.”

Even if Carney can’t teach her students everything she’d like about writing, she’s committed to the process. Not only does she see writing as important to her students’ careers; she also thinks it’s vital to their thinking.

“Writing crystallizes things,” she says. “You read a research paper and think, ‘Yeah, I understand that.’ But if you actually have to write about what you’ve read, you sometimes realize that you don’t understand it after all.”

As a way to encourage students to think critically, Carney asks students to read and respond to two articles that reach different conclusions about the same topic.

“The question for my students is ‘How can two research groups of talented people at good universities come up with different answers to the same problem?’ A lot of students think when they see something that’s been published that it must be the answer. But it’s hardly ever the complete answer,” says Carney, adding, “Just because it’s been published doesn’t mean the answer is correct.”

If Carney has her way, her students will be astute enough to question everything they read and skilled enough to write compellingly about their own conclusions.

UWC Executive Director Valerie Balester and UWC Associate Director Candace Schaefer will discuss how faculty can actively discourage plagiarism, including using tools like Turnitin.com proactively and designing assignments that minimize students’ opportunities to cheat. Matt Fry, director of the Aggie Honor System Office, will discuss how to proceed if you suspect a student has plagiarized. He’ll also review why it’s best to report plagiarism through the official channels.

“There are always going to be students who flaunt the rules,” says Balester, “but there are steps faculty can take to make plagiarism a less attractive option. Fortunately, most of those steps are fairly simple, and they also align with many of the best practices for teaching writing.”

The workshop will run from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. with lunch provided. To register, go to the UWC Web site: uwc.tamu.edu.