short anal. Draft

Karl Covington

ENG3029

Short Analysis- Rough

21 March 2013

 

It seems to me that there has been a fundamental change in instructor feedback on writing since I started college back in the spring semester of 2011. In my freshman composition class, my instructor would hand back papers with red pen markings so abundant that it looked as if the whole paper was simply wrong. Words, sentences, and even whole paragraphs would be crossed out; marginal comments were frequent, and never positive, and if he were to offer praise of any kind, it would only occur during one of the few individual conferences students had with him during the semester. It was very discouraging at first, but ultimately became the reason I wanted to become a better writer. Today, it has been my experience that most instructors do not provide feedback in this way at all, actually it is almost opposite. In this paper, I‘ll be looking specifically at a popular style of digital feedback in which instructors comment throughout the paper in margins, and write in paragraph form their overall feedback on the paper as a whole, placing this paragraph either at the beginning or the end of the paper. After reading the feedback from the sample, as well as feedback from papers of my own, I have a few questions: Will this style of feedback really (in most cases) get the best out of a writer? If so, what level of writer should it be for? I’ll be analyzing the language of a sample of feedback to see how the instructor gets the student to understand what he/she should do, and projecting how effective the comments may be; in some cases, compared to how effective the harder style of feedback may have been.

THE LANGAUGE

One of the first things I noticed about the feedback is that it is what I will refer to henceforth as soft. That is, the language is not very straightforward, but leaves room for disagreement. In sample 4 of data set 4, several of the teacher marginal comments start with the words I’m not sure. A great deal of the rest of them is peppered with other non-threatening phrases such as I feel like and I wonder if.

The language of the comments is written in a way that tells the reader of the instructor’s perspective and what they are getting out of it. This is in juxtaposition to the more traditional style of having the teacher stand in more of a judgment seat. In total, 14 of the 19 comments have language in which the instructor purposely identifies his view as a subjective feeling and/or uses words like might or maybe (usually a combination of these two things). One of the five remaining is praise and therefore is completely direct, and two of them simply reference another comment. Here is an example of the language present in most of the marginal comments:

Comment [ML5] This part seems incomplete to me. What else might students need to know about citing sources? It’s more than just the particular style they use.

Notice the way the professor the professor keeps from making a judgment of this particular part of the paper by using the verb ‘seems’ instead of ‘is’ and further bolsters his position as a reader by adding the words ‘to me’, which implies that his observation is subjective and could possibly be an error on his part. Furthermore, the instructor asks a question that gives the student a reason for why readers may find the particular section incomplete. The instructor phrases it as a question, but I think it could be as effective in a form of a statement. Then the teacher ends with a statement that seems to me to combat the potential student response of “nothing” in response to the previous question. In my opinion, the instructor has covered both bases in this marginal response. He/She has identified a problem, and provided a solution, while at the same time, passively aggressively in my opinion, implying that there is no way to avoid the proposed solution. Here is what I believe a more traditional form of marginal comment would read:

This part is incomplete. Talk about what more students need to know about citing sources.

In my opinion, both forms will accomplish the same results in the case of comment 5, and furthermore, I think they are completely interchangeable in the case of many students for one major reason.

POWER RELATIONSHIP

Whether the language in feedback is soft or direct, the professor can often get what they want accomplished, I believe, because they know that the student knows that despite the language, the teacher is the ultimate judge. Comment 5 is the perfect example, actually. The instructor could essentially say all three things in statement form, without recognizing his subjective vantage point. However, the student knows that because the instructor took the time to write it, whether he says it softly or directly, he/she should re-work the section or redo it.

The power relationship becomes clearer in the summary feedback.

“I know it may seem like I’m asking you to do two contradictory things: condense and expand at the same time. To a degree, I am.”

Here, perhaps more than at any other point in any of the feedback, the instructor fully possesses his role in the power relationship. Not in a distasteful or arrogant way, but direct nonetheless.