David of chapter 14 writes like my students

Chapter 14 is another interesting one that suggests practical ways to improve my teaching of writing.  The part of the chapter that says that there is evidence to support the theory that all feedback and comments written on students’ papers is a waste of time or a negative practice is something that I’ve thought about for many years.  I think that the vast majority of my thousands of students didn’t give a crap about the comments and corrections that I’ve written on their papers.  I’ve done much of my editing of students’ papers in conference settings and I think that most of them don’t give a crap about what I’ve said or written in that format either.  I’m going to change the way I respond to student writing. 

I’m going to use the checkmark system on the left of the line.  I’m going to write positive comments that suggest ways to solve writing problems rather than pointing out errors and shortfalls.  I’m going to let my students write to a broader audience by figuring out a system of peer reading and evaluation.  The writing won’t just be addressed to the teacher as audience.  I want to know if what Lindemann suggests about peers as audience makes the readers better writers and revisers of their own papers.

In every chapter Lindemann emphasizes the importance of pre-writing.  In evaluating David’s paper she shows that some of his problems stem from using unnecessary, filler words to come up to a prescribed number of words.  She suggests that by pre-writing, inventing many ideas, David would not feel the necessity to pad his essay with extra, unnecessary words; and his pre-writing would suggest possible ways to organize his ideas rather than trying to cram his thoughts into a pre-set form like the five paragraph essay.