It shouldn't come as a surprise that my experience with revising papers was little more than elaborate editing and proofreading. A teacher in middle school taught me what traditional grammar marks mean, and that was the majority of what I looked for as I would "redraft" my papers. After working through Lindemann, Recchio, Sommers, and, to some extent, Brodkey, as well as sections from Twelve Readers Reading, I now understand why I was always so frustrated that my papers seldom warranted the "A" mark: no one bothered giving me constructive advice about how to alter the substance of my papers, only the surface level grammar. My experience collaborating with colleagues on those portions of Twelve Readers Reading illustrates the complexity and utter need for useful comments on student papers.
I already mentioned that getting grammar advice back on my papers was not overly helpful. Peter Elbow elucidates this sentiment in his response to Donna's essay, "The Right to Pray," in Twelve Readers Reading. He says, "I'm certain [your essay] won't pass on the grounds of mistakes in mechanics, and I feel pretty sure that it will still fail even if you clean up all mistakes" (137, emphasis added). Discussions with my colleagues on how to respond to this essay showed that we were essentially unanimous on at least one point: Donna's mechanical mistakes were not nearly as important as her errors in organization and argumentation.
The priority of organization over mechanics is an important issue to point out because a more traditional response to her essay would be filled with a myriad of circles, lines, and attempts to create more coherent sentences. In the margins, the teacher would give some small comment such as "elaborate," "awkward," or "fix this." This focus on the sentence level ends up confusing the student since the focus is on the grammar when the paper would "still fail even if you clean up all mistakes." Nancy Sommers describes the problem a little more clearly. She says, "These different signals given to students, to edit and develop, to condense and elaborate, represent also the failure of teachers' comments to direct genuine revision of the text as a whole" (151). Clear and non-contradictory comments are required on student papers.
As stated previously, my colleagues and I agreed, for the most part, on the direction Donna would need to go in order to improve her paper. Even in an essay full of extant mistakes, readers take different approaches and focus on different areas. For instance, Donna's lack of research was a major issue for one of the colleagues in my group. Before the points of argument were even addressed, I would approach the structure of the essay since the research could then be completed and "dropped" in place. Still others felt that logic was a better place to start. In such an instance, I think Erika Lindemann gives sound advice when she recommends "limiting the scope of our comments" in order to "make learning more efficient" (238). Not wanting to overload the student with things to improve on in her essay, we ultimately settled on a two-point approach: improve structure by finding the topic sentences in each paragraph (creating new paragraphs and reordering material as necessary) and improve the argumentation by focusing on how the opposition would retort, evaluating whether her argument adequately addresses the counter-arguments.
What surprises me is how David's essay, "The Four Seasons," actually sparks more debate than Donna's paper. The main area where I feel I was wrong in the beginning is how harshly to grade this essay. My initial responses were more akin to those of Anne Gere, feeling that David did "a very good job of conveying to your audience the 'feel' of the seasons" (62); by the end of class discussions, I was leaning more toward Donald Stewart, realizing that David hadn't described the four seasons in Syracuse, but "described four idealized seasons" (55). Through discussing the paper and reading the actual readers' responses, I realized that I was suckered in by language that equates to many chocolate bunnies you get at Easter--sweet on the outside but hollow on the inside. This is one area I mean to improve on recognizing as I read student papers.
More controversy came as my group of colleagues and I tried to determine what comments we would put in the essay. Some of these were reiterations of what the actual readers pointed out, but others were things we noticed on our own. For instance, I hadn't even noticed that David was switching between first and second person points of view. Once it was pointed out, though, it became a glaring issue. Several of my colleagues pointed out the issue of the idealized seasons--something I had completely overlooked in my reading. We also discussed how going through all four seasons might be a little large in scope for this essay, and we ended by noting that David may be dealing with an issue of struggling to choose the right genre for the piece as the prompt asks for more of a descriptive narrative rather than a comparison contrast (which this paper seems to be with the underlying comparison of Syracuse and Tallahassee).
Reading student papers is a tricky business. In a group of four, one would think there wouldn't be many discrepancies, but for both a decently written paper and a decently shoddy paper, disagreement abounded. The good news is that through discussion, a consensus was generally attained. While this might be a plug for portfolio grading, I think it is more indicative that much more care needs to be taken in approaching student papers than has traditionally been given. The bottom line is that emphasis needs to be moved from editing to actual revision, encouraging students to revise the structure, arguments, and even themes of their essays as they prepare final drafts for submission.
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