Chapter 14 in Bean: Writing Comments on Students' Papers

Bean begins his discussion by talking about how teachers often forget the "personal dimension" of grading students' papers (239). So often we got lost in a sea of run-on sentences, underdeveloped ideas, weak arguments, awkward sentences, missed punctuations, and lazy conclusions that we forget we are grading actual human beings' papers. We need to be aware of this as teachers so our comments aren't overly short or snarky. Our comments should encourage revision not dropping out of college.

Bean listed a sampling of comments left on students' paper and the reactions the students had to the comments. Here are some of my favorites:

Comment: Be more specific.
Student response: You be more specific (241).

Love it. So often "be specific" doesn't mean anything to a student. I know what when I have gotten that comment, I wondered "about what? I thought I was being specific."

Comment: You haven't really thought this through.
Response: How do you know what I thought? (241)

Comment: Try harder.
Response: I feel like kicking the teacher (241).

As you can see, all of these comments discouraged students from writing and revising when they should be encouraging students to do these things.

Shortly after Bean states that our purpose "is not to point out everything wrong with a paper but to facilitate improvement" (241). While I do agree with this to some extent, I do feel the responsibility to the writer to point out everything that I see as the reader, at least all of the higher-order concerns. I feel like when a student comes to me for help, or I am giving a student back his paper revise, he is trusting me to point out all the places that I see where he could revise his paper. I feel obligated to do so. As a student, I know I would be very frustrated if I revised my paper and re-submitted it and had cleared up all the issues that my teacher had pointed out, but I still got a B on the essay because the teacher didn't point out everything, so I didn't know that it needed more work. In fact, I would pissed.

I know it can be overwhelming for students to see all of those comments, but at least I feel like I am equipping them with everything they need to get an "A" and improve their essay. I feel like that is my job as a tutor or instructor. Plus, I don't think these comments are too overwhelming if handled appropriately. Instead of saying, "Be more specific," ask a question in the margin that the student can answer that will make his essay more specific. Psychologically this is better anyway. The student doesn't think, "Oh, I did this wrong," but "Oh, the teacher wants to know more.

I did, however, totally agree with Bean when he said that teachers' comments should prompt revision and deal primarily with higher-order concerns. He defines higher-order concerns as "ideas, organization, development, and overall clarity" (243). He then offers a list of questions to help guide revision:

-Does the draft follow the assignment?
-Does the writer have a thesis that addresses an appropriate problem or question?
-If the draft has a thesis, what is the quality of the argument?
-Is the draft effectively organized at the macro and micro level?

Again, Bean says the teacher should only comment on 2-3 areas, but as I stated before, I disagree.

I also disagree with how he suggests we handle lower order concerns. While I agree that we shouldn't line edit, he does suggest putting an "X" in the margin next to sentences that have grammatical errors. For a student who misplaced a comma, or forgot to put one in, this would be confusing as hell. A student wouldn't know if he was missing a comma, had improper punctuation, a problem with subject-verb agreement, or something totally different. I can see putting an "X" where there are misspellings or typos, but I think we should still circle other grammatical errors if we think the student does not know the rule. I think we should look for patterns of error, then explain the rule to the student. From what I hear, students are most frustrated with comments because they don't know how to go about fixing them. An "X" would just frustrate students, in my opinion.

Bean then goes on to discuss endnotes. He suggests that endnotes should" sum up the strengths of drat [...] identify main problems, [...] and make a few specific suggestions" (251). I think this is an effective model.

Basically what I gather is that we should use revision-based comments to respond to places where a student could improve his essay, praise him when he does it right, and have individual conferences with our students to make sure that they understand our comments and have a plan for revision.