Responding to Student Writers

by Sommers, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9781457619342
• ISBN10: 1457619342
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-08-01
• Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's

Summary

From Nancy Sommers, Responding to Student Writers offers a model for thinking about responding as a dialogue and not a fix-it operation - and for thinking about the benefits of responding to writers as well as to their writing. Braddock Award-winning teacher-scholar Nancy Sommers has taught composition and run composition programs for more than three decades. As the principal investigator of the Harvard Study of Undergraduate Writing, she followed 400 students to explore the role of writing in undergraduate education and to see comments through students' eyes. Sommers currently teaches writing and mentors future teachers in Harvard's Graduate School of Education. In this resource, she focuses on the roles that teacher feedback plays in writers' development.

Author Biography

Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers and Responding to Student Writing are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Ninth Edition (2010).

Table of Contents

Note to Fellow Teachers	p. vii
Introduction	p. x
Why comments matter	p. xi
Considering a writer's development	p. xii
Seeing comments through students' eyes	p. xii
The call-and-response of commenting	p. xiii
Setting the scene for responding	p. 1
Offering one lesson at a time	p. 1
Understanding the purpose of comments	p. 2
The dangers of overcommenting	p. 4
Responding to rough versus final drafts	p. 5
Finding the right tone	p. 5
Developing a common language	p. 7
Creating a link between classroom and comments	p. 7
Engaging students in a dialogue about their writing	p. 9
Establishing a role for students in the dialogue	p. 9
Revising with comments	p. 11
The Dear Reader letter	p. 12
Making the most of comments	p. 13
Writing marginal comments	p. 16
Marginalia	p. 16
Less is sometimes more	p. 17
Developing a scale of concerns	p. 17
Writing end comments	p. 21
End comments on early drafts	p. 21
End comments on final drafts	p. 23
Taking students seriously	p. 24
Managing the paper load	p. 26
Focusing on student learning	p. 27
Varying the purpose of comments	p. 29
Varying the style of comments	p. 30
Mentoring students to become thoughtful readers	p. 31
Resisting the urge to correct grammar and punctuation errors	p. 31
Finding a role for grading rubrics	p. 33
A case study: One reader reading	p. 34
Reading Lena's draft	p. 40
Brief Bibliography	p. 43
Responding to Student Writers: Best Practices	p. 44
Index	p. 47
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