Getting Feedback: Student Writers
Megumi
Taniguchi
I have them do a lot of
peer critique, and so they get used to that concept rather quickly and they
realize, there's some people who freak out and say, "Oh my gosh you mean I'm gonna have to show this to someone else?," and they're very
scared of the whole process. But once they start doing it they realize that,
how valuable it is and what I really try to do when I give them comments, I
always have, they exchange drafts with another classmate, so they always have a
classmate's responses, and I give them comments. And in my comments I realize
how important it is, students always feel like, 'Well, she's just a student
what can she tell me? She's the same age as me, she has the same background as
me, she's from
Student
Well I think you could
write about what you're feeling when people call you like, Elaine, or
something, 'cause I know I call you Elaine, even though I totally know, but
it's just easier to say.
Taniguchi
So you call her
Elaine?
Student
Yeah.
Student 2
She always just does
that to make me mad.
Student
And then, on the other
nickname, like "Kuda-ling," what does that mean? Like, I don't know what that means
either.
Student 2
I don't know, it's just
like…you know when you like, when people call you, and they tease you like…I
don't know, it's not really anything bad, or it's like how my cousin always
sings like, "Kun-da-ling," you know, it's like
teasing name. Like, I don't know, it's
just how he says it.
Student
But what does that
mean? Does it mean anything?
Taniguchi
Students always, always
have at least one excellent comment to give each other, always. So in the end it's almost like…and a lot of
times I sit there and I'm amazed and I'm really impressed because students will
pick up on stuff that I've entirely missed, be it because I was staying up
until two o'clock in the morning trying to drink coffee, trying to stay awake,
or because I just didn't see it that way.
Chris Lowe
One of the greatest ego blows you receive as a graduate
student is when you spend hours, days, weeks, months working on a paper,
polishing it, honing it, getting it to what you think is just perfect. And then
you give it to your professor or you send it out to your peers for review,
which is a standard practice in scientific writing. And you get it back and
it's just ripped to shreds. Because you've become so close to what you're
writing that you can no longer see the forest through the trees. And it's probably one of the most beneficial
tools of scientific writing is giving a paper to a friend, to a colleague, to
your boss. To your advisor, to your professor, and letting 'em just rip away. The hardest thing that students have to learn is to develop the
right skin for writing. You need very thick skin because everybody has
different styles and the idea is the more people who read it, the more people
who can improve it.
Michael Bertsch
Having students, say "Nice essay" is not really valuable to
the writer. The most valuable thing that I start in my peer critique sessions
is the reader says, 'I like this area because…'
Adding that extra reason to why the person liked it, that's very valuable.
Because saying, "Nice essay," well my mother says that to me. Now I just sent my
mother a short story about two weeks ago, and I said, "please tell me what you
think of this, if you have any problems reading through it, places that slow
you down, or places that speed you up and after she read it she goes, 'I can't
say anything to you, this is just so good, I can't say anything.' And I go, 'No
that's not what I asked. Watch yourself read it, what happened as you were
reading it? Were there places that you had to slow down, did you have to think
over any of the words, were any of the situations unusual?' and she goes, 'Oh,
I just can't critique this.' So that's not valuable to me. My mother says 'Nice
essay.' And that doesn't work for me. But if she says, 'This is a nice essay
because…I couldn't put it down till I got to the end.' Ah! This is valuable.
Now I know that I've engaged my reader.
Kim Stanley Robinson
People will tell you,
"Well I thought that worked really well." And the next person will say, "Well I
thought that didn't work at all." And at that point you have to sort out which
one of them you believe and which one of them you think can help you. You begin
to judge the criticism of your own work as being more than, you know, "God the
teacher says this, therefore it's true and therefore I'm wrong." You look at it
and you think, well that may be true for you but I don't believe it at all and
I'm gonna stick with this sentence because it works
for me. And so you begin to get more confidence in your judgment as a writer as
you begin to judge the criticism of your work.