Commenting on student papers is arguably one of the most time-consuming parts of teaching writing, and can feel particularly daunting to new faculty. Where to start? What to prioritize? Are students even reading our comments? Yet, research suggests that giving feedback can be the most important part of our work for a variety of reasons— the learning through revision we inspire, the growth we foster over a longer path, a meaningful exchange that can shape student attitudes about writing for the rest of their lives. Nancy Sommers, a foundational researcher in this area, asks us to remember how we ourselves were shaped by comments on our writing, and even how “words teachers scribbled on our papers, inscribed in memory, are often the same words we write in the margins or at the bottom of our own students’ pages” (2006, p. 248).

This is the first post in a series devoted to paper comments: how students perceive them, best practices for writing them, what inspires substantive revision, and more, all drawing from influential research in composition studies. Let’s start with a few classics, excerpted here as key findings and suggested best practices.

Students tend to…

• “Flatten-out” our comments, not recognizing which comments we consider more important than others, often feeling pulled in too many directions.
• Interpret comments as prompts for rule-based rewording, rather than “revision.”
• See comments as highly idiosyncratic, based on a professor’s personal preferences.
• View paper comments as applying only to the particular paper at hand, but are most influenced by comments that also suggest improvement areas for future papers, in an exchange where they are apprentices studying with an engaged reader.
• Get quite familiar with the standard genre and pattern of our end comments. A few small shifts in how we organize our end comments can have a profound impact.

Insights for our commenting practices:

• Beyond using a rubric (which students can interpret as a checklist for correction), can we categorize comments so students understand their relative importance and priority? And limit the types of comments in each category so they don’t feel overwhelmed and can focus on key skills and thinking?
• Can we write comments that challenge students to also rethink their choices and ideas, and not just at the sentence- and word-level, but across the paper as a whole?
• Can we frame our skepticism and challenges within the larger goals of the class and the discipline , especially using meta discourse about writing that we reinforce in class?
• Can we include feedback about long-term goals for their writing, looking ahead to other classes and papers?
• Do our end comments couple “coaching” and “revision” suggestions with positive evaluations, not just negative ones?

For a more in-depth summary of these classic studies and their implications, see the Writing Pedagogy Selected Readings List.