Taylor, S. S. (2011). "I really don't know what he meant by that": How well do engineering students understand teachers' comments on their writing? Technical Communication Quarterly, 20(2), 139-166. doi:10.1080/10572252.2011.548762

12:59, In this study, Smith tries to ascertain written comments' helpfulness in the field of engineering by analyzing comments from both engineering and English faculty. The study is mixed methods because she has to interview both the engineering and English faculty in order to see what they meant by particular comments, but then she interviews students too in order to see what they thought. So I say mixed methods because Smith has to analyze a corpus of comments quantitively, then cross reference the numbers with students and teachers intentions and understandings. 

She compared a lot of her results to an earlier study she had done: 

Smith , S. ( 2003a ). The role of technical expertise in engineering and writing teachers' evaluations of students' writing . Written Communication , 20 , 37 – 80 . [Crossref], [Web of Science ®], [Google Scholar]

What did she find? 

Focus

Reason

Mode

Development 

Content/form 

Mechanics 

This study identified two components of students' understanding of comments: recognition of the focus of the comment and comprehension of the reason for the comment.

Students incorrectly guessed a focus 18% of the time

 Unfortunately, the students were unable to venture any guess about the focus of 8% of the comments, and in fact, this “I have no idea” response was the most common response if the student did not recognize the focus correctly.

The comments least likely to be recognized were coherence (40%), validity (45%), and effort (0%, but the sample included only two such comments). These were three of the four least common focuses, so students were less accustomed to seeing and recognizing them. 

Coherence comments tended to be confused with development of ideas; 83% of the unrecognized coherence comments were interpreted as development. This finding suggests that students had difficulty recognizing the difference between level of detail (development) and relevance or internal consistency of details (coherence). 

This tendency of students not to recognize validity comments suggests that teachers should more clearly highlight the topic of validity comments as the truth of the information and perhaps elaborate more fully on the concept that the student needs to learn. Comments that included phrases such as “can't be right” or “not so!” were recognized by students as validity comments, giving the students a better opportunity to identify mistakes and learn from them.

Only 55% (388) of the 708 comments in the study were well understood, with both focus and reason recognized. (See Table 4, which shows the extent of understanding of the reason behind comments in each focus category.) If we include comments for which the student partially understood the reason, the percentage increases to only 68% (481) of the 708 comments in the sample. 

 Illegible handwriting was a pervasive problem in this sudy, as was also the case in Taylor's research of student mis-readings of faculty comments (2011). Over and over, students confessed that they could not read some of the faculty comments. Other "fixable" problems were failure to respond in a timely manner, failure to prioritize comments, failure to qualify comments (and consequently overgeneralizing context-specific advice), and, most importantly, failure to have a long-term view of revision. All of these can be addressed to some degree in faculty development workshops and in brown bag lunches.

For example, Mary Hayes and Donald Daiker (1984) determined that students frequently misinterpreted and even ignored the feedback they received. More recently, Williams (1997), whose research is described above, found that 25% of written comments were not understood as teachers intended, and in Taylor’s 2011 study, only 55% of 708 comments were well understood. These studies all focus their analysis on how students interpret each comment individually. 

Yet, this study focuses on perceptions, rather than on the comments

themselves, so it tells us more about how students process comments than

about the content of the comments. Simply assigning a writing task may shift

students’ attention away from comprehending material and toward the style

or clarity of their own writing. The idea that there may be confusion is suggested by Taylor’s 2011 study of how engineering students understood written

comments on their papers. In separate interviews, she asked teachers and their

students to explain what comments meant. These interviews indicate that

students may focus more on issues of expression in their writing rather than

logic or accuracy, even when they receive comments that teachers explained

in interviews were pointing to misunderstandings of material. For example,

a comment one teacher had written about something that was “completely

inconsistent with the rest of the paper” was described by the student as saying “we should have elaborated and explained more” (149). Another student

responded to a comment by saying “I think that is just a difference in the way

we’re writing”; however, the teacher explained that “[it is] a correction because

they said the computer was used to set the steam pressures. You’re not actually

setting the steam pressure” (149). Furthermore, when asked to explain comments that targeted the validity of information, students declined even to guess

18% of the time. 

so this is the one where students are not perceiving that teachers are calling the logic sequence of their ideas coherent, rather, the students are thinking that they're talking about their writing 

lit review 

Such research on student reception of response is less common than are studies of the comments themselves.

Regarding preferences, Straub (1997) found that students prefer comments that state the reason for an evaluation and that tie the reason to the student's ideas or words, thus confirming an established best practice. 

Similarly, Patchan, Charney, and Schunn (2009) found that students' comments on peers' papers tended to offer more praise and directive solutions than did faculty comments, and Patchan, Charney, and Schunn speculate that the student practices reflect their preferences. Kind of like the advice thing for basic writers, 

the disciplinary element of context has received little attention.

context has a strong effect on both the writing and the reading of comments

misc. 

But teachers in engineering aren’t going to grade with a contract, so validity comments matter/…

But that’s not you. You’re not asking whether it leads them to revise, you’re asking how it changes the quality of their writing, but would that have any implications for revision? 

Revision studies, 

Studies that measure the extent to which comments lead students to revise or to achieve improved learning outcomes have attempted to address such concerns by examining the effectiveness of comments as teaching tools. 

genre, script: it's interesting to think about how students need a script for interpreting comments, that is, the comments they don't recognize are the ones they aren't used to seeing

&&&

x

The genre of the end comment: Conventions in teacher responses to student writing

Smith, Summer.College Composition and Communication; Urbana Vol. 48, Iss. 2,  (May 1997): 249.

In this article, Smith studies the genre of the end comment, obviously, but she does so using two different samples: one from Penn State, and another collected earlier from Connors and Lunsford in 1993. 

She relies heavily on Bakhtin in order to form her questions and interpret her results, specifically Bakhtin in his distinction between primary and secondary speech genres. Importantly, Bakhtin observes that secondary speech genres like the novel digest primary genres, and change them while they do so. Or as Smith says, "The use of the imperative to suggest or make an offer is unusual in everyday conversation and most written genres. The high incidence of the command in the coaching genres supports Bakhtin's assertion that primary genres change when they are absorbed by secondary genres (62)" (n. pg.). 

She broke her results down into three different categories: (1) judging genres, (2) reader response genres and (3) coaching. 

Smith also made some suggestions: "To minimize the intimidation and thus make the suggestions and offers more inviting to students, teachers should consider two techniques. First, provide specific guidance in suggestions, rather than simply restating an evaluation in question or command form. Second, rather than commanding students to accept offers of assistance, use a structure such as "If you stop by my office, we can practice with some examples to improve your sentence variety," which emphasizes the benefits of choosing to visit the teacher" (Smith, 1997, n. pg.). 

While I read this, I wondered how the move to contract grading would affect results like these. 

Other judging genres, such as evaluation of correctness and justification of the grade, are selected from the repertoire primarily to convey negative messages. Naturally, teachers rarely mention correctness unless they perceive a problem. Justifications of the grade, which explicitly mention the reason for the letter grade assigned to the paper, are usually an attempt to forestall authority challenges, which occur most often when a student receives a low grade. For example, one teacher wrote "Though an interesting read, this paper does not fulfill the assignment and must receive a failing grade."

Third, 54% of the positive justifications of grades in the Penn State sample feature WI" (meaning the teacher) as subject. For example, "I gave your paper an A because you executed each aspect of the assignment well and wrote an especially strong conclusion." This technique heightens the praise by emphasizing that it comes from an expert, the instructor. It also allows the teacher to retain control over the discourse, even while acknowledging that the paper had an effect on him or her. (When negative, sentences justifying a grade in the Penn State sample conform to the "the paper" subject convention.)

But what were Smith's results exactly? 

And is there a point at which Smith talks about the ratio of justification comments? 

J Wolfe: In line with what I've been finding, it seems like most people want to talk about the quality and nature of teacher's comments, whereas I want to talk about how students take up other students' comments. How does students uptake of other students' comments affect their revisions as compared to expert comments? 

Writing." CCC ( 1982): 148-56. Sperling, Melanie and Sarah Freedman. "A Good Girl Writes Like a Good Girl." Written Communication 4 (1987): 343-69.

Beason, Larry. "Feedback and Revision in Writing Across the Curriculum Classes. RTE 27 (1993): 395-422. Brannon, Lil, and Cy Knoblauch. "On Students' Rights to Their Own Texts: A Model of Teacher Response." CCC 33 (1982): 157-66.

Zak, Frances. "Exclusively Positive Responses to Student Writing." Journal of Basic Writing 9 (1990): 40-53.

Others have researched the effect of comments on students' revisions. Melanie Sperling and Sarah Freedman, for example, found that one student consistently misinterpreted her teacher's marginal comments because the student did not share the teacher's knowledge and values regarding writing and revision. Larry Beason extended this research by identifying correlations between teachers' commenting aims and students' utilization of feedback. Still others have suggested that teachers should use alternative commenting methods, such as mentioning only the positive aspects of a piece of writing, in order to improve their responses (Zak).

&&&

x

x

x

 Joanna Wolfe’s (2002) research with undergraduate English students demonstrates that marginal comments influence students’ perceptions of the source text; passages with evaluative annotations are more effective than underlining in boosting student recall, while, interestingly, the perceived position of an annotator has the ability to shape readers’ responses to the text. For example, annotations by a professor, teacher, or person the student believes is an authority affect the way the text is received; accordingly, many students were “swayed in the direction of the gloss’s valence (i.e., positive evaluations uplifted students’ ratings of source arguments, and negative evaluations depressed their ratings)” (Wolfe, p. 319). Wolfe’s study confirms what many educators—from Erasmus to the current day—have known about the power of marginal commentaries to affect the reception and interpretation of a text. The ability of “negative” comments to affect how a reader relates to a source has pedagogical implications for writing practices as well as reading practices. For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments.

" to affect the reception and interpretation of a text"

"affect the way the text is received"

"swayed"

" For example, when a teacher returns a piece of writing to a student, if the comments in the margin are mainly negative at the beginning, the student may disengage from the comments."

x

x

Some studies have investigated the degree to which annotations can be used by subsequent readers. Wolfe (2002, p. 300) considers not only the possibility that “the annotator’s presence can influence readers’ interactions with the source text” but she even goes further and imagines that “if students perceive the annotator as a potential reader of their own texts, they might envision a particular, opinionated reader already familiar with the source texts” (Wolfe, 2002, p. 301). Some research indicates that 914 JDOC 70,5 highlighting improves retention and that “readers of instructional material containing little or no typographical cueing may benefit from highlighting done previously by others (especially if done by students seen as high achievers)” (Fowler and Barker, 1974, p. 364)

x

elaine lees, "Building Thought on Paper with Adult Basic Writers"

Moffett

Beliefs, 

Self-certainty, 

Pittsburg, 

Discovery, 

 "discuss a time when you were creative and then go on to explain, on the basis of the incident you have described, what creativity means,"

x

Concrete operations Piaget, 

Moffett outlines a hierarchy of abstraction in discourse, from What he sees as the lowest level, recording of "what is happening" at present, through an intermediate level of reporting or narrating "what happened," to higher levels of generalizing about "what happens" and, finally; theorizing or arguing "what will (or) may happen." Moffett suggests organizing a curriculum by having it "recapitulate, in successive assignments, the abstractive stages across which all of us all the time symbolize raw phenomena and manipulate these symbolization." Moffett asserts that at every stage of life we are "constantly processing new experience up through the cycle of sensations, memories, generalizations and theories."3

x

to find ways of constructing talk about this subject at what Moffett would call differing levelS of abstraction

x

perhaps one way adult Basic Writers may rid themselves of their restrictive notions about writing is

to rework the gentraliz' ations and theories they have constructed about it. 

x

Post pedagogy, it’s trying to teach them, sequence, you see a lot of that in this book, 

x

a

right to consider themselves writers. 

x

to generalize from what they have described by drawing some conclusions about themselves as writers, based on the incidents they've written about in their papers.

x

to question the disparity between the textbook-like formulations they have very likely relied on to describe the activity of writing and the complex experience they have just had in constructing a paper.

x

to question where their ways of writing have come from and to see their accounts as constructions, not immutable givens.

x

begin to see themselves as constructors and construer

x

underestimate their own roles as builders.

x

they

say so little about the actual activity of writing. 

x

Someone usually offers the suggestion that "there really isn't much you can say about writing." The next question, then, becomes "What sorts of subjects do people have much they can say about' and students' answers are usually "subjects they're interested in," or, "subjects they know well or study a lot." A, teacher can point out that students are thus suggesting that what one can say about a subject is not so much a function of the subject a thing "out there," a received thing as it is a fiction of the writer's perception of the subject as problematic, as pen to exploration and ordering through language.

x

in which students give a name to what they find difficult about writing

x

to dramatize a connection between writing and thinking, to enable students to realize that acts of naming and renaming may be seen as acts of learning and may affect the outcome of their writing efforts.

x

to recognize that ways of addressing their problems as writers

fall within their own control.

x

the revision of language can be more than a "polish-

ing" process: the search for new words involves one in a search among

new thoughts, among statements about the word; and in making such

'choices one creates one's possibilities.

x

When one espouses a new theory, one possesses a new means of

interpreting experience, or rather a new means of experiencing. To

acknowledge theory's ordering power, the course's final assignment

brings students full circle, to a reconsideration of their first papers.

The students are asked to write again about the experience presented

in their first papers, this time "in the light of" or "in terms of" one of

their newly articulated theories. Then they are asked in class to

explain what difference writing "in terms of" the theories has made,

first, in the way their papers represent the experiences they had and,

second, in the way they now perceive themselves as writers. These are

difficult questions, but they are important ones for students who may

never have considered themselves theoreticians before.

x

the shuttling from particular to general,

from evidence to conclusions based on it, offers students insight into

some of the peculiarities of academic discourse. That this discourse,

for a term, has been about themselves and that it has grown, in their

own hands, from written narrative to written theory, further legiti-

mates these adult learners' re-entry into the academic world

x

they have begun to do something academics do to manipulate statements in ways that academics manipulate them. They have been involved in makir q ideas, not simply waiting for them to happen. They have had a chance to see that understanding of subjects like writing and change

is not rl..tach something one acquires as it is something each one, as a lang, t.-er, possesses the power to create.

x

“distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112).

This activity also offers a way to encourage students to reread without the trap of having the second reading become the instructor reading.


Although adherents of close reading have argued that one of its main goals is to foster independent readers (Shanahan, 2014), in practice, close reading can do the opposite, creating situations in which students read the text once to prove that they have read, but then wait for the instructor to reveal its true meaning. Certainly, educators can create situations in which students become responsible for these second and third readings and thus slowly gain confidence in their ability to examine texts not just according to what is being said but why and what the implications are, but they must do so with care to avoid the kind of trap that Bialostosky (2006) and others have discussed (see also Beers & Probst, 2013).


Moreover, as Bialostosky (2006) argued, it is often in these second or third readings that teachers reveal to students the “true meaning of the text,” teaching students to “distrust their initial uptake” (p. 112). That is, instructors need to be careful that the first reading does not become the student reading, and the second and third readings belong to the instructor, decreasing students’ motivation for reading even further.




The guides described in this section also focus solely on intensive reading practices, which McConn (2016) described as “reading the minimum number of texts required by the syllabus with a focus on the details” (p. 164) at the expense of extensive reading practices, defined by Carrell and Carson (1997) as “rapid reading of large[r] quantities of material...for general understanding” (p. 50). This is in spite of a lack of empirical evidence to support the former (Carrell & Carson, 1997; Hinchman & Moore, 2013; McConn, 2016).

"Studies that focus on contexts that instructors create for students’ reading..." (emphasis on "instructors")

Adler-Kassner, Linda and Estrem, Heidi. (2007). "Reading Practices in the Writing Classroom". WPA: Writing Program Administration, 31(1-2), 35-47.

Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) worry about how writing programs leave goals for reading unstated. They're worried about what's happening at a very high level of scale. They Part of their concern has to do with the fact that it's not popular to talk about pedagogies of reading in graduate education, which has the effect of leaving graduate students without the support to teach students how to read. This is a problem, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) suggest, because, while grad students know that they are suppose to be getting undergraduates to actively read, the grad students's practices might not be geared to making that happen. Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) use the phrase "fall back" at one point (p. 39). They're worried about grad studnets falling back into bad habits--those bad habits in this case being a conflation of the role of reading and reading itself (p. 37). Drawing on Sheridan Blau at one point, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) quote him with regard to his idea of  “the culture of interpretive dependence,” the assumption by teachers that their role is to tell students what reading is about—and the concomitant assumption by students that their role is to be told what reading is about (20-24)" (p. 39). At the same time, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) draw on Deborah Brandt in order to talk about how, in order for undergrads to produce a "good reading," they will have to "...analyze  the  ideals  and values associated with the “sponsoring” situation at the same time as they consider  how  their  own  contexts  and  experiences  affect  their  interpretations of the texts being read" (p. 38). In other words, Adler-Kassner and Estrem (2007) do something similar to what Stuart Selber does with critical literacy, namely, students are supposed to analyze the situation of reading at multiple levels--the level of the personal, the programmatic, and the cultural. So the goal is, ostensibly, for students to analyze the encounter between different contexts, or perhaps even the context that's created as a result of that assemblage in that place at this time, etc. I wonder if this has anything to do with Malinowski's distinction between context of situation and context of culture. 

And here are just some key quotes: 

the critical need for composition instructors to carefully define how we want students to be as readers, and why, within the framework of  reading and writing in our classes, programs, and profession, participating in these ways is important for them as readers and writers. Leaving this work undone, undefined, unstated leaves yet another gap into which others can come and say, “here’s how you should do your work”

White's Law, sure, but then what if we want students to become something along the lines of the Liberal Arts curriculum that Perry outlines?

It’s important to note here that we have not asked how students read—that is, we are not asking how students interpret or use readings. Rather, we are interested in how “directions” for reading attempt to shape the roles that students play in reading and what ideological implications accompany those attempts. 

But isn't this exactly what I'm doing? 

composition’s frequently-repeated goal of finding a “third space” that can balance the perpetual tension between “inventing the university”—cultivating students’ acumen with conventions associated with academic genres while incorporating their ideas into them—and the desire to challenge the ideologies that are maintained by those genres at the same time (Bartholomae; also see Spellmeyer; Bizzell; Royster; Barwashi)

Isn't this Harris as well? Guess not. It sounds a lot like Coe maybe... This is Bartholomae: "students are supposed to relinquish prior language practices" (Mary Ann Cain).

Practice-based reading will also help readers navigate between what Sheridan Blau has identified as two “common and closely related misperceptions” about reading: “the widely held idea that there is only one authoritative and best interpretation for ... texts” implied in the idea of irreducibility, and “the opposite belief, which many students and some respected scholars think to be the logical alternative to the first position ... , that there is no single or authoritative interpretation for a literary text, ... [that] any and all interpretations have equal authority” implied in relationality (60). As Blau argues, both are myths—the boundaries around “acceptable” and “unacceptable” interpretations involve a performance that integrates one’s own interpretation and acknowledgement of the dominant interpretation, with a heavy dose of audience awareness thrown in.

And this just sounds like the two levels down in the Perry scheme. Dualistic and multiplistic, which is subordinated to relativistic. (see appendix below)

Thus, it is important to disentangle the complicated layers of reading expectations, cultural definitions of reading, student practices of reading, and the pedagogical imperatives surrounding reading in the writing classroom in order to examine and cultivate kinds of reading that we want students to perform. For some readers, the idea of asserting this much “control” over a role might seem shockingly teacher-directed—after all, don’t we want students to develop their own strategies, cultivate their own roles? Yes, but as the lenses adapted from Hanks’ work demonstrate, such relationally-informed performances have their limits. As with all of the read ing approaches described above, this reading must take place within (and with full understanding of ) conventions guiding the contexts in which they will interact as readers and writers. Just as “experienced writers understand that writing usually involves an element of role playing” (Clark), when readers develop strategies for inhabiting a variety of active roles, they are more comfortable moving among the various contexts for reading that they encounter.

That just sounds like Carillo, that last part "strategies for inhabiting a variety of active roles" (see appendix). And then there was this guy (Alexandria Peary) who seemed to capture the idea that "select the most applicable strategy" 

Of course, this approach to thinking about reading is, to some extent, prescriptive—after all, we are outlining distinct ways of reading that impose constraints on the possible range of interpretations that students are permitted. But just as Richard Straub argued that all instructor comments, even “non-directive” ones are really directive (and that it was more honest to not hide behind “suggestions” when those suggestions were invocations) (244-46), we would argue that the same holds true for reading. Reading theorists from Stanley Fish to Sheridan Blau have demonstrated that readers never interpret texts outside of communities (Fish) or cultures (Blau), and that those communities and cultures have vested interests in putting some boundaries around the range of possible interpretations. As Blau has put it, “our practice [of interpretation] is, in fact, governed by established disciplinary procedures that provide standards for distinguishing between valid and invalid interpretive claims” (75). 

And that sounds like Zizek. (see appendix below)

For some readers, something nearly unspeakable can happen during the reading process. The problem comes when instructors are unclear about what that sense of mystery and magic means, when they expect students to achieve it but are unable to identify its elements, when they forget that it comes as much from a synchronicity between a reader’s values and her interpretation of a text as from the context where the reading is done. When instructors expect magic, they sometimes take for granted that reading is a complex interaction between reader, text, and context. Student readers, too, sometimes find that the very mysterious nature of what instructors “want” brings them to complete frustration.

And so a tabulation of the (virtual?) background, like in wilder & wolfe (not Kaufer and Geisler, with whom you always mix it up). 

As James Gee has argued, there is always “a way (or the way) of reading a text,” and that way “is

only acquired ... by one’s being embedded (or apprenticed) as a member of a social practice wherein people not only read texts of this type in this way, but also talk about such texts in certain ways, hold certain attitudes and values about them, and socially interact over them in certain ways” (39-41).

And this of course is Downs (apprenticed), you need to email him

Appendix:

Perry maintains that most college students who construe reality from a dualistic orientation have already begun to realize that complex topics generate a diversity of opinion, but that they accommodate this diversity in terms of black and white. While these students might not believe that they themselves have access to knowledge about reality, they believe that legitimate authorities do. Thus, they confront diversity from dualistic orientations, unreflec- tively adopting the point of view of the "right" authorities, and dogmatically denouncing the position of the "wrong" ones. Other students, however, those who have confronted the fact that even good authorities do not know everything yet, and in at least some areas may never acquire total knowledge, have different metaphys- ical and epistemological assumptions. These students, who con- strue experience from a multiplistic orientation, might implicitly assume that objective reality exists, but they do not believe that it can be known without uncertainty. And since multiplistic students assume that absolute knowledge is not available to even the experts, they believe that one point of view is as valid as another. Finally, according to Kitchener and King, there are other students who, having been confronted by teachers and peers who have asked them to support their opinions with evidence and reasoning, come to approach the .experiences of college with reflective thinking constructs. These students accept the inherent ambiguity of knowledge and yet, through evaluating and analyzing alternative opinions, make judgments concerning which points of view probably offer better or worse approximations to reality. They realize that even though authorities cannot know reality without uncertainty, some perspectives are more rational or based on stronger evidence. Since reflective students understand the know- ing process to be fallible, however, their decisions are necessarily tentative and contingent upon reevaluation. (55-56) 

Slattery, P. (1990). Applying Intellectual Development Theory to Composition. Journal of Basic Writing, 9(2), 54–65.

And so, when students are frustrated by the elements of the text that remain inaccessible despite the eight questions the textbook provides, they may not be able to recognize that this is only one reading approach that happens to be failing them at that moment, and that they might more readily access the text using a different approach. Taught within a mindful reading framework, to read rhetorically is as much a deliberate decision as is the decision to abandon that approach and employ another in its place.

Ellen C. Carillo. (2016). Creating Mindful Readers in First-Year Composition Courses A Strategy to Facilitate Transfer. Pedagogy, 16(1), 9–22. https://doi.org/10.1215/15314200-3158573

This reflexivity undermines the notion of the Post-Modern subject free to choose and reshape his identity. The psychoanalytic concept that designates the short-circuit between the repression and what it represses is the superego. As Lacan emphasised again and again, the essential content of the superego’s injunction is ‘Enjoy!’ A father works hard to organise a Sunday excursion, which has to be postponed again and again. When it finally takes place, he is fed up with the whole idea and shouts at his children: ‘Now you’d better enjoy it!’ The superego works in a different way from the symbolic law. The parental figure who is simply ‘repressive’ in the mode of symbolic authority tells a child: ‘You must go to grandma’s birthday party and behave nicely, even if you are bored to death – I don’t care whether you want to, just do it!’ The superego figure, in contrast, says to the child: ‘Although you know how much grandma would like to see you, you should go to her party only if you really want to – if you don’t, you should stay at home.’ The trick performed by the superego is to seem to offer the child a free choice, when, as every child knows, he is not being given any choice at all. Worse than that, he is being given an order and told to smile at the same time. Not only: ‘You must visit your grandma, whatever you feel,’ but: ‘You must visit your grandma, and you must be glad to do it!’ The superego orders you to enjoy doing what you have to do. What happens, after all, if the child takes it that he has a genuinely free choice and says ‘no’? The parent will make him feel terrible. ‘How can you say that!’ his mother will say: ‘How can you be so cruel! What did your poor grandma do to make you not want to see her?

zizek [at this link: https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v21/n06/slavoj-zizek/you-may!] 

Wilder, L., & Wolfe, J. (2009). Sharing the Tacit Rhetorical Knowledge of the Literary Scholar: The Effects of Making Disciplinary Conventions Explicit in Undergraduate Writing about Literature Courses. Research in the Teaching of English, 44(2), 170–209.

Kaufer, D., & Geisler, C. (1989). Novelty in Academic Writing. Written Communication, 6(3), 286–311. https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088389006003003

offering advice is the sort of authority that basic writers are used to

Ray and Barton (1989a) contend that even basic writers rhetorically read; it's just that the sort of rhetorical reading they do isn't valued in academic discourse communities. In order to make this claim, Ray and Barton (1989a) closely read 59 of their own students' texts. That is, Ray and Barton (1989a) ask both graduate (n = 23) and undergraduate (n = 36) students to read the same article in anthropology (Edward T. Hall's "The Anthropology of Manners"). In doing so, Ray and Barton (1989a) give both groups the exact same amount of time (2.5 hours), same instructions, etc. As a result, Ray and Barton (1989a) find that basic writers rhetorically analyze--though Ray and Barton (1989a) never mention the phrase "rhetorical analysis" in the full-length article from which this response is derived ("Changing Perspectives on Summary through Teacher Research")--but the basic writers do so in a very particular style: they summarize as though they are offering advice. Drawing on Bartholomae, Ray and Barton (1989b) suggest that offering advice is the sort of authority that basic writers are used to: "this language reflects the authority of teacher, parent, and text" (p. 170). On the other hand, experienced writers rhetorically read, too, but they do so while making use of the first-person singular pronouns, which is to say, they write from the perspective of an academic community: "...the interpretation of the text seems a matter of common agreement, rather than a writer telling a reader what to think" (p. 171). To quote at length:

The interpretive summaries from both our basic and graduate student writers provide specific evidence that meaning is socially constructed even within the supposedly objective genre of summary: both groups of writers summarize by telling how the text makes them feel and by relating it to what they already know. Basic writers depend on the context of their personal lives and their associations with the general public outside the university, while graduate student writers depend on the context provided by prior texts and their associations with others inside the academic community. Graduate student writers use the same interpretive strategies; it is just that what they feel and what they already know are more conventional ways of feeling and knowing in the academic community. (p. 171)

More specifically, since only about 50% of the basic writers wrote what Ray and Barton (1989b) were initially inclined to call "summary," it should be noted that

At first, we saw these summaries as ideal goals and these students as successful. Now, however, we see these students as making a pragmatic choice to write the exact type of summary we had asked for; they deliberately chose not to include their interpretations and reactions to the original text, adopting our goals for their reading and writing. The students who did not write objective summaries were those who could not or would not subordinate self to teacher or text. (p. 172)

In other words, "Both groups talk about the text in terms of meaning, purpose, audience, and intended effect" (Ray and Barton, 1989a, p. 481), though only some students opt to change the conventions according to which they do.