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).

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