Across the Disciplines wac.colostate.edu/atd

A Journal of Language, Learning and Academic Writing ISSN 554-8244

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37514/ATD-J.2006.3.1.02

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while these methods save teachers time, do they help students improve their

writing? A survey of research into teacher commentary, conceived of as a contextual

discourse activity, initially questions the efficiency of many shortcuts because it

finds complexities in all activity areas, in regulation (criteria, rules of genre and

mode, disciplinary styles, and standards), consumption, production, representation,

and identity. The research, however, also recommends particular shortcuts and

methods of revising them for better efficiency and effect. It especially recommends

restricting the volume of teacher commentary in ways that are task, discipline, and

learner specific.

If a way to the Better there be, it exacts a full look at the Worst.

handouts, and computer feedback software. Therein lie two paradoxes. Simplifying a complex task

may take the challenge and fascination out of it and end up making it laborious in a new way, boring

and repetitious for both teacher and student, on the order of vacuuming the house. The other paradox

has more serious implications and is the major concern of the present essay. Latent in a complex task

may exist labor-saving methods, but how can they be extracted except through a full look at the task's

true complexity? That takes labor, precisely the commodity that people who need shortcuts have in

short supply. Sticking to current shortcuts postpones that full look, yet without it there is no

guarantee they are the most efficient.

Perhaps it is time for an examination of the problematics entailed when teachers, anywhere in the

university, respond to student writing. By response, I should emphasize, I do not mean the mere

Haswell 2

William Blake's road of excess—excess of understanding.

Obviously my argument is not that shortcuts in response signal poor teaching. Among other things

that argument would be hypocritical on my part, since one such labor-saving method, called by its

author "minimal marking" and still in wide-spread use after nearly a quarter of a century, was

devised by myself (Haswell, 1983). My argument here is that if we want shortcuts (and who doesn't?)

then we should find those that are doubly workable—both labor-effective for the teacher and

learning-efficient for the student—and that a quick start to finding them is through an exploration of

the true complexity of teacher response to student writing. With luck the pay-off will be directions

for new solutions and for improvement, if not trashing, of old stopgaps.

My plan is to survey the major components of the activity of teachers responding to student writing,

rhetorical aims and strategies peculiar to the discipline, sometimes beget distinct instructional

when teachers think about their own discipline's genres and teaching practices. Familiarity breeds

temptation—the temptation to cut corners. It is true that researchers have sometimes found faculty

across academic divisions, including English, ranking or otherwise sorting the criteria for evaluating

writing in rather similar ways (e.g., Spooner-Smith 1973; Michael et al., 1980; Eblen, 1983; McCauley

et al., 1993; Smith, 2003), but we will see that as often researchers have found sharp differences in

understanding and application of the twists and turns of response. The risk is teachers imagining that

when research is cited deconstructing their distinctive response to writing, their discipline is being

put down. I can only trust everyone will soon notice, as the findings accrue, that the even gaze of

research has observed pretty much the same curiosity in every field, that the ecology of response—

its full human, social, and institutional context—is more complex than the customary practice of

socially and contextually sizing up another person (Bazerman, 1989), interacting with that person

(Anson, 1989), and trying to collaborate together on a task (Martin & Rothery, 1986). As new

approaches take center stage, new answers no doubt will accumulate.

For the purpose of this essay, my own answer derives from theories of discourse acts. I want to look

at instructional response to writing as an activity supported by and supporting normal discourse

practices, an activity no different and no less complex than recommending a book or answering an e-

mail. Response, of course, has long been understood in terms of its ecology or its embeddedness in

group, institutional, and social practices and constructions (Lucas, 1988; Gottshalk, 2003). Discourse

activity theory has added the complication that as all human practices, teacher-student interactions,

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing

3

understanding of response is that it locates and embraces a breadth of interacting factors. It will

intermediating with everything in its surround is what I need for this examination of research

findings and its main argument that such response is anything but simple.

For my survey, let me borrow a recent model of cultural discourse activity that seems comprehensive

studies textbooks published by London's Open University. In this flow chart (Fig. 1), "through which

any analysis of a cultural text or artifact must pass if it is to be adequately studied" (du Gay, 1997, 3),

language practices interrelate dynamically through five activity

nodes: consumption, identity, representation, regulation, and production. Application of the model

does not require specialist knowledge. As a test illustration, take an 14-year-old who reads and then

buys a t-shirt that says "SCHOOL SUCKS" (consumption) because it appeals to her vision of herself

(identity) and next day wears it to class to make a statement about herself and perhaps to please her

friends (representation). The principal soon hears about it from her teachers and with hardly a word

sends her home to change clothes (regulation). It is not long before the company making the t-shirt

becomes alarmed at public reaction and shelves that particular slogan (production). A cooked-up

Haswell 4

Regulation, the Epicenter of Instructional Response to Writing

I start with the factor of regulation, as it is perhaps the basic motive for teachers and their response

to student writing. The term "regulation" may seem too Draconian for a service that teachers in all

disciplines view as beneficial and perhaps even freeing for students. But beneficial for what

purposes? Freed in what directions? Response is regulative because it hopes to move novices and

their writing toward some more mature psychological, professional, social, or cultural ends. This is

obvious with commentary that is corrective. "Your point is unclear" does its small part to keep

social groups. Each is elaborate. Interplay, constraints, and contradictions among them are rife.

Criteria provide the stock replies every teacher can call up at will, often cannot help but call up.

Criteria comprise nothing less than a vast armory of lore that ranges from knowing the correct

spelling of "existence," to feeling a break in flow for lack of a "this," to judging that a summary

paragraph too much repeats the abstract and will offend the reader in the field. The size of the store

can be judged by the thickness of usage handbooks, scores of which are printed, reprinted, and

revised every year. Even taxonomies of criteria are so elaborate they look biological. Mellon (1978)

identified 34 "compositional competencies," each of which can be judged lacking in a piece of student

writing. An international cross-cultural study of school writing located 28 main criteria used by

teachers (Purves & Takala, 1982); Grabe and Kaplan (1996) reduced second-language competencies

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing

5

than humanities teachers to excuse stylistic infelicities if the content is accurate -- a finding of long

because they did not agree on a definition of the term (Dulek & Shelby, 1981).

Regardless of discipline-specific preferences, good writing traits hang over the head of teachers like

a mort main. Criteria are long lived ("paragraph unity" has spanned four centuries now) and wield

the abbreviations the same, in fact, kept the editors from updating the criteria (Hawhee, 1999).

Whether teachers rely on Harbrace or some disciplinary style manual, most find themselves using

correction symbols and abbreviations—¶ for "You need to start a new paragraph here," "SF" for

"You have committed a sentence fragment," "ref?" for "These are facts are not common knowledge

and you need to cite your source for them." The custom is evidence of the multiplicity of criteria,

which cover the field so thoroughly that any passage of student writing will scare up a flock of them.

The custom also betrays the plight of responders, who hope that the makeshift of a limited correction

lexicon, often ill understood by students, will control this flock that persists in coming back, season

after season.

Genre and mode rules complicate matters because they mediate or undercut the assumed universality

of criteria. This is a fact no amount of pleading for global writing traits will dispel. Murray (1982a)

may argue that six qualities bridge all discourse modes, including fiction and nonfiction: meaning,

authority, voice, development, design [organization], and clarity. But this is a position easy to counter,

for instance, the universality of "voice" with the voicelessness or impersonalization of technical

documentation, or the universality of "meaning" with the deliberate non-sense of surrealist poetry.

Besides, all of Murray's qualities are mediated quite differently by different genres and modes. In a

personal journal "authority" may be furthered by emotive language, in a travelogue by proper names,

& Lerner (1999), for instance, found write-to-learn principles cited as a purpose for course

assignments by 91% of their arts and science faculty, 44% by their pharmacy practice faculty. Also

teachers often do not have a ready synopsis of the rules for the particular genre they are asking

students to write. Further trouble lies in teachers applying response that is presumably consistent

since it is regulatory, when their writing assignments include different genres with different

discourse rules.

Disciplinary style adds to the trouble. All disciplines have their own Harbraces, both literally in the

form of published style manuals and intuitively in the heads of their practitioners, and the rules

governing rhetorical acceptability differ from one field to the next as much as the Council of Biological

Editors citation style differs from that of the Chicago or the American Psychologist Association. From

Haswell 6

discourse seems to recommend such certainty (Ober, Zhao, David, & Alexander, 1999), philosophical

One could argue that first-year college students, most of whom have hardly imagined a major for

themselves even if they have declared one, are unready for disciplinary styles, but then by what style

are they to be regulated? There is no ready, or efficient, answer to this complication. Needless to say,

in their first-year content courses students often find disciplinary regulation dispensed anyway,

piecemeal and ragtag. Once in a study of the effect of first-year English composition courses upon

to the second examination. Between the two tests English-department writing teachers had trained

the students to compose introductory paragraphs in essay-exam questions, while at the same time,

the environmental-science teacher told students as he handed back the first test that when he saw

an introduction in an examination essay he assumed the student didn't know the answer and was

bluffing. He wanted no introduction at all. Here a reasonable response shortcut, advising students

about the rules before they do the writing, was not as simple for the students to absorb as the teacher

may have thought.

Standards, as this incident shows, mediates regulation and response with its own conflicting rules.

Were the English teachers now obligated to teach and judge introductions in a way contrary to their

tastes and beliefs? Couldn't the environmental-science teacher have allowed a sentence or two by

way of introduction? How was I supposed to respond one time when my advanced-composition

students, and I'm not making this up, told me that their journalism teacher had said no sentence could

have more than one comma? Standards have a way either of over-regulating or under-regulating

teacher response to writing. They over-regulate when they force teachers to focus their response on

a limited number of writing traits, excluding traits the teachers know are important and highlighting

traits they know are inconsequential or even vitiating. This bind is not trivial. Daily thousands of

teachers, in and beyond the schools, are penning or voicing response to student writing under the

formality can be achieved in a hundred different ways, including frequency and kind of hedging.

"Appropriate" just brings back the confounding of genre, mode, and discipline, and adds the further

confounding element of level of accomplishment, confounding because unspecified. At what point

does a student's performance become inappropriate? It depends on a raft of factors, including

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing

7

"error gravity" by ESL researchers. It leads to some of the most complex of writing response

interactions. For instance native English-speaking instructors thought second-language English

errors with Greek students writing more serious when the mistakes impeded comprehension, while

native Greek-speaking instructors thought the errors were more serious when they were "basic" or

mistakes that writers should know how to avoid (Hughes & Lascaratou, 1982). Plenty of other factors

than native language mediate error gravity, of course, including sex of teacher (Hairston, 1981),

perceived responsibility for the student (Janopoulos, 1992), academic field (Kantz & Yates, 1994),

and rank or years teaching (Kantz & Yates, 1994)—as well as personal idiosyncrasy. An

teachers responding to error gravity and other issues of standards are not going to be found in the

WPA Outcomes, or anywhere else that I know of.

writing response is seen to be—and regulation is only one of five main factors—the less chance, it

assiduously follow the teacher's surface emendations and disregard the deeper suggestions

regarding content and argumentation. They prefer global, non-directive, and positive comments but

make changes mainly to surface, directive, and negative ones. In sum, they want lots and certain kinds

of response, but have trouble doing much with what they ask for (Hayes & Daiker, 1984; Ziv, 1984;

Straub, 1997; Winter, Neal, & Waner, 1996; Underwood & Tregidgo, 2006). Of course, some of the

blame rests on teachers, who often think they are positively emphasizing central qualities such as

Haswell 8

1977; Connors & Lunsford, 1988).

To make matters worse, the problems lie not so much with students or with teachers but with the

interaction between them. Some of the most disturbing investigation into response seems to show

that students and teachers operate under very different evaluative sets. Whether it is due to age,

gender, experience, expertise, social position (Evans, 1997), or classroom dynamics (O'Neill & Fife,

1999), students and teachers tend to consume writing quite differently. They have trouble speaking

the same language of response because their responses to the writing itself are so far apart. Students

tend to read to comprehend, teachers to judge (Gere, 1977). Students interpret detail realistically,

teachers emblematically and literarily (Hull & Rose, 1990). Students prefer an orally produced style,

in the hands of the writer (Tobin, 1989). Students look on writing options as right or wrong or else

an endless shelf of choices with no way to choose, teachers as rhetorical choices leading to the best

strategy (Anson, 1989). Students take a first interpretation as the only one, teachers as a first position

to be revised upon consideration of other interpretations (Earthman, 1992). Students place the most

importance on vocabulary, teachers on substance (Yorio, 1989). In his study of student and English

teacher reading predilections, Newkirk (1984) observed that students preferred the obvious and

familiar, teachers the unusual and new; students overt meanings, teachers unstated; students explicit

organization with headings, teachers implicit organization; students a bland tone, teachers an

emotionally enhanced tone; students a high register, teachers a middle register.

If students and teachers conflict so much in preference for style and attitude toward the author's task,

then we may have a partial reason for another discouraging set of research findings. Little consistent

association between writing improvement and volume or kind of response has been documented. It

seems that the time-honored effort of inscribing commentary on student papers is sometimes

honored with a proven pay-off and sometimes not, at least within the time span of the course. In a

characteristic pre-post study, Marzano & Arthur (1977) compared the effect of three kinds of

commentary, one that only marks error, one that only suggests revision, and one that only fosters

critical-thinking. They found minimal effect on the students' writing with all three types (for

practice, universally condemned by most teachers, of restricting response to a grade, or worse of

hoping that sheer volume of writing without any teacher feedback will improve student skills and

not merely ingrain bad habits (the negative research findings on that hope are reviewed by Sherwin,

1969, pp. 156-167).

producing it. Some modes of response must be more effective than other modes. But the past erose

research record on effectiveness does help explain a history of teacher restlessness in response

practices, usually reflecting a search for methods that will work better with the student and save the

teacher time. There have been historical upswings, for instance, toward audiotaped response, one-

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing

9

sick of so much of it.

Students, after all, are the main consumers of instructional response to writing. Not unreasonably

they want their money's worth. Most students yearn for teacher commentary, even when they don't

make the best use of it. In an old but well controlled semester study (Stiff, 1967), experimental

students found their papers with marginal comments only, or with end comments only, or with both

marginal and end comments, and although the writing of the three groups were not significantly

different at the end of the semester, the first two groups complained that they had been neglected.

But can teacher shortcutting avoid student short-shrifting? All across campus students write papers,

and they all expect a reaction beyond a grade or a number. The question is how can teachers best

breaks—bent over an initial response to just one set of papers. That leaves out of the total the time

devoted to second and third drafts.

some would say. It is no wonder otherwise gentle colleagues in English departments will fight tooth

and nail to keep out of the writing classroom. Nor is it any surprise to find peppered throughout

composition bibliographies titles such as "When It's One Down and 1,249 Themes To Go," "Avoiding

Haswell 16

straight composition classes, and an argument for WID. It's easier for the student to shrug off the

because it seems too critical and generalized (Hillocks, 1982), the recommendation for improvement

too removed from their current habits because it seems too risky (Onore, 1989), the critique from

peers because it comes from novices (Odell, 1989), the critique from teachers because it comes from

an instructor they sense holds a marginal or tenuous academic position (Whichard, et al., 1992). They

resist not only for such questionable reasons but also for a good one, because they are more and more

seeing themselves as independent and ultimately free to use language as they wish. They resist

because they are students. As William Perry put it in a very early piece on resistance and response

(two decades before publishing the book for which he is famous, Forms of Intellectual and Ethical

Development), "the young will resist even your efforts to reduce their resistance" (1953, p. 459).

That doesn't make response any easier for teachers. The self-contradictions in the above panoply of

student resistance just encourages teachers to identify themselves, among other things, as skeptics.

To student papers teachers have to bring their own resistance. Perhaps the least defensible reason

for it is the assumption that student writing is abnormal, apprenticeship work, and therefore worthy

of skepticism, at least a kind of skepticism teachers don't bring to real-world writing (Lawson & Ryan,

1989). The most defensible reason for their resistance is the thought that the effort they are about to

Some Directions to Shortcuts

every classroom they enter. Teacher feedback can largely be a waste of time, for both teacher and

student, unless the critical language is grounded in the specific rhetoric of the field under study. The

caution applies to every kind of shortcut, assignment desiderata ("Be sure your paper is well

explaining and illustrating them. Let the rest go. The same principles of showing and selecting apply

The Complexities of Responding to Student Writing

17

standards. Student can be told that papers below a certain level of writing will just be handed back