Nudging, Patience, and Unbridled Encouragement

The challenge of responding to student writing

Nobody has a worse attitude about faculty development than I do. For almost 50 semesters, I have been called back before the first day of class to participate in several days of meetings. I could tell you more about how I feel about that, but I’d have to bleep out so many words, it wouldn’t make any sense. Yeah, I get it. It’s a job. You do what they tell you. Stop all the whining. But there are so many things that are broken about my job in particular and higher education in general (see this article about the resignation of Claudine Gay for a taste)—so many self-inflicted wounds, so many maddening injustices, so many soul-destroying moments… meetings on top of all that? meetings that don’t address any of that? Well, it’s a bit much.

But this year, I decided one way to mute my profane thoughts about the whole week would be to actually participate, something along the lines of, “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Thus, for one hour next week, I’m going to facilitate a discussion on “Responding to Student Writing.” I can tell my boss is a little nervous about my doing this, understandably, since I’ve said a total of about 100 words to anyone other than my students in the last two decades at my job.

I tell my husband about my decision. “I’m not sure they realize I’m one of the best in the world at this,” I say. My husband has a very transparent thought bubble, and in that moment, it reads, “Yeah, right.”

“You weren’t aware?” I say, smiling.

Long pause.

“No, I wasn’t aware that you’ve been recognized as one of the best in the world at this.”

“Well, that’s not what I said.” We laugh.

They don’t give out Nobel Prizes for “Great comments,” but if they did, and maybe they should, I think I’d be in the running.

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I have had pain and extremely limited range of motion in my right shoulder for the last three years. I finally went to an orthopod yesterday. He said I could fix it with physical therapy and a steroid shot into the joint. “But,” he said, “You won’t notice a radical difference immediately. It’s very small changes gradually over time.” That’s how I think about comments on student papers. I think they can improve students’ writing, and that those changes contain the possibility of so many other life-altering open doors. But it’s a lot of fucking work, and the changes are not big flashy ones. They’re small, like pebbles that collect in the bend of a stream, gradually lifting some of them out of the water.

My ideas about responding to student writing come from a lifetime of teaching; a degree in Composition and Rhetoric that included a semester and 3,000 pages of reading on the topic; my own writing and the feedback I’ve received on it; a fascination with how, what, and why people learn; and the piercing question of whether the personal cost of the comments I write can ever be offset by whatever benefit they might generate.

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Here is a random collection of some of the things I know and think related to how teachers can choose to respond to their students’ writing, with some quotations and anecdotes sprinkled in. This topic takes up a vast amount of bandwidth for me, so I want to try to limit myself here. I know this is a pretty niche area of expertise. Please feel free to reach out if you want to extend the discussion.

1.      My daughter’s riding teacher always says, “When an apple is ripe, it falls from the tree.” A young riding student overheard this expression and asked, “What does that mean?” “It’s hard to force an apple to ripen, right?” her mom replied. I take my role in the “ripening” aspect of learning from Vygotsky, who suggests a teacher’s job is “to nudge students into areas of proximal development.” Because every student has different “areas of proximal development,” such “nudging” has to be highly individualized. Put differently, there is a huge range of problems that students can exhibit when it comes to their writing, and because writing is connected to identity in ways that other subjects are not, and teenagers often find themselves (or lose themselves) in tsunamis of ontological angst, the way you address each student at the end of their paper often requires… well, it often requires a lot:  of thought, of energy, of tact, of encouragement, and not just in terms of what you say but also in terms of how you say it.

2.      Writing is a skill that develops over time, endlessly. As Hemingway opined, “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” Critical ingredients for this evolution are practicing writing and wanting to improve. Too easily, teacher comments can shut down the desire to do either or both of those things.

3.      Teaching people to ride better, to run faster, or to execute a better vault comes with built-in feedback. The horse goes or doesn’t go, you cross the finish line first or not, you stick the landing and win Olympic gold, or you don’t. Teaching people to write better is much trickier—from the student’s perspective, what’s the goal? All they have is you to judge them. And who do you think you are? Many of my students have a default mistrust of teachers, especially English teachers. That mistrust is often well-deserved. English teachers seem to have a greater disparity of “hills to die on” than most.

4.      My Hill to Die On comes from something I was told in a writing pedagogy class: that what student writers struggle with more than anything else is “playing up and down the scale of abstraction.” What does that mean? A paper needs an overall idea, and it needs information to go with that idea. Students have a hard time with both, tending to confuse a topic for an idea and vast generalities for evidence.

5.      When I respond to a piece of academic writing, these are the first two things I check for. Is there an idea expressed as a claim, and is there evidence to go with that claim? Getting evidence out of students can feel like pressing blood out of a stone. I find that you have to “carpet bomb” the idea everywhere: bringing it up when they make comments in class, mentioning it when they reflect on their personal lives, highlighting it when you provide details to make a point, discussing it over and over, pointing out how most of the time, we don’t drill down far enough into specifics. In other words, try to show how claims and evidence are part of our everyday lives. Make those words part of their vernacular so that they don’t feel foreign when you mention them in your comments.

6.      Responding to student writing can feel like a privilege and an honor, an incredible challenge that comes with a huge sense of accomplishment, especially when a student decides to trust you. But it also has the capacity to destroy you. It is a seemingly Sisyphean task that can eat you alive. You know what good writing is, and you want your students to be good writers. But so much of what you’ll see early on may be uniformly abysmal. Accept this, and keep thinking “Long journey, small steps.” Repeat this mantra for yourself and your students: Everyone can write, and everyone can improve.

7.      Couch yourself as a coach, someone who helps them achieve their own goals. Talk about being able to “run three miles” at the end of the semester, and that this is the minimum distance they have to reach in order to succeed in the other “races” they will have to “run” in college. Explain that those metaphorical three miles represent the ability to have and develop (with evidence!) an idea in a coherent way. Sounds so simple, just like running three miles, and it is, but not if you don’t put down your phone and get in shape. Tell them about the law of 1%. Just try to be 1% better every time. Eventually you’ll get there.

8.      I sometimes have profanity-laced internal diatribes about students—they’re not trying, they’re lazy, they’re combative, they’re ungrateful, and for the love of god, why won’t they just let me help them? But I find that such churning doesn’t change anything other than my own ability to enjoy teaching. If you extend empathy to every student and assume they’re all doing the best they can where they are with what they have, sure, sometimes you’ll be the fool. But you’ll still be accessing the best part of yourself and maybe sometimes bringing out the best in them.

9.      These thoughts have been a bit abstract so far. Here are a few specific tips that have helped me when writing comments:

a.      Loosely follow this formula: what you like, what the student could keep working on, and what you wonder about based on their writing. Think: praise, polish, question.

b.      The most important thing you can say to a student, according to Donald Murray, is “I like the way you…” Sometimes I embellish and say “I JUST LOVE the way you…”

c.      Don’t make your comment a justification of the grade. (In fact, consider not grading your students’ writing, something I may write about another time.) The most valuable comments and the ones students will take most to heart are ones that nudge them towards improvements they can make in the future, on a next draft or assignment.

d.      Don’t be your student’s line editor. One paradox about writing is that as students become more sophisticated thinkers, their ability to write well may regress. Expressing complex ideas is hard and takes practice. (As Donald Murray explains, “Syntactic failure is a sign you’re trying to say something important.”) After being nudged into new ways of writing, students won’t execute those new techniques perfectly at first. For example, if you do a lesson on semi-colons, you might see semi-colons popping up in all the wrong places. But think about the way young children learn language. When they say, “It breaked,” they have learned an important rule, how to put verbs into past tense. “It broke” will come later, just like that ripe apple falling from the tree.

e.      Two key words you can use: “understandably” and “even.” As in, “Your writing is a bit muddled here, understandably, since you have taken on such a complex topic. If you can take another pass over this with an eye towards grouping similar ideas into paragraphs, your point will be even more compelling and your writing even easier to read.”

f.       Know that students will only absorb your message if you say it in the way that they can hear it, wherever they are as a student, a writer, and a human being. For some, it’s ok to say, “This is a hot mess lol.” Others are more fragile. Always consider what they thought they were trying to do. Micromanaging their revisions in order to make their writing conform to your vision might make for an objectively better paper, but it discounts the student’s agency. Such feedback prioritizes “trains running on time” over basic humanity. Help them gain competence and confidence as a writer going forward rather than just fixing up that one piece of writing.

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Here are a few other thoughts and anecdotes:

We compose our comments in response to student writing just as they have tried to compose something in response to us. The whole enterprise can sometimes feel like theater. The overwhelmed student submits something they don’t really care about by braiding some sentences from a chatbot with their own lackluster ideas. The overwhelmed teacher writes, “Not your best work, B-.” For both student and teacher, the experience is meaningless, and no learning takes place. The apple stays on the tree.

It can be hard to coax a student into caring. “How can I make myself care about writing?” one asked me. “You don’t have to care about writing,” I said. “You just have to care about what you’re writing about.” Similarly, sometimes it can be hard to summon the energy it takes to write that perfect comment. But on a good day, I really care about my students. (I’ve been doing this a long time; there are some bad days.) This care motivates me to try to write good comments even though that can feel like a real grind sometimes. Which is probably exactly how students feel about writing papers.

Part of what makes caring hard for students is that many of them don’t believe that they have anything important to say. When I asked students to discuss Chat GPT, one student said it was the greatest thing ever. “You’ll get what you want, and I’ll never have to write another essay.” They don’t believe what we know: that writing is invaluable as a tool for figuring out what we think, for metabolizing grief, for alchemizing trauma into beauty, and for influencing others to create the kind of world we want. Convincing them that I am interested in their words and thoughts is fundamental to everything else I might write on their papers. Sometimes my belief has to come before their ability. It’s like imagining they do their writing in invisible ink that will only show up under the light of faith. To me, the cost of some inevitably misplaced faith (that little sting of, “Oh, I’ve been made a fool of again”) is small compared to the power of these words: You can do it. I believe in you.

Sometimes that belief results in a beautiful reciprocity, as in this comment from a student about my comments to him.

Your comments have helped me a lot throughout this semester due to the fact I’m not used to college level writing. It has definitely been an adjustment to basically having to think more than I’ve been used to on assignments. Truthfully though, what I appreciated most from your comments was just your unbridled encouragement. Sure, some of your comments would be tougher than I would expect but they came out of wanting me to improve. They at least made me feel like I was going in the right direction. I really liked it when you would point out specific flaws in my writing and instead of giving me a direct solution, you instead gave me something to think about in order to fix it. I really took your comments to heart.

Not every student will hear your comments so perfectly, or be able to reflect your impact back to you so meaningfully. But sometimes all those little nudges pay off. And that can feel like enough.

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Now so much I know that things just don't grow

If you don't bless them with your patience

—"Emmylou” by First Aid Kit