Responding to Student Writing and Valuing the Work of Composition Instruction (Nancy Sommers, Carol Rutz, Howard Tinberg)
- Sommers, in her award-winning article, finds that "teachers' comments can take students' attention away from their own purposes in writing a particular text and focus that attention on the teachers' purpose in commenting" (386). What is the problem here? As teachers and thoughtful readers of student texts, don't we want students to understand why the comments we make on a text matter for a revision?
- Why does Sommers endorse the view that "we need to sabotage our students' conviction that the drafts they have written are complete and coherent" (390)? Why is it good to "force students back into the chaos," as Sommers counsels (390)? Is it good? Find a recently written student text that you think would benefit from an encounter with the chaos, isolate a paragraph or part of a paragraph, and explain how you might encourage a productive revision with a comment.
- Sommers, in her re-vision of her own article, is struck by the absence of students in the article. In many respects, the recent Harvard film (Across the Drafts) and the re-visions article attempt to address this omission. But we might do some of this work ourselves. We have collected student texts, made comments, and returned them to our students. Are you in a position to have a sense of your students' responses to your feedback? If so, in what ways does their feedback map onto what Sommers reports? Or not? If you do not yet have a sense of your students' perspective, what do you think might be some obstacles?
- Rutz and Tinberg, each in their own way, take Sommers' original text to task on several issues. I would like to focus on the image of the writing teacher Sommers constructs. Writing about faculty responses at a workshop focused on Sommers' article, Tinberg writes, "Imagine my surprise when several people around the table expressed anger - and even hurt - all directed at a personal way at Sommers and her research colleagues, but especially Sommers" (263). Think about your own education and about your own work as a teacher. Think about Rutz's points about context. Are you angered by Sommers' article? If so, how might writing teachers have productive conversations about commenting styles, the balance between substantive and surface comments, revision and proofreading, and more?
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