Why Can't All Academic Articles be as Clear as Nancy Sommers'

    Nancy Sommers’ article is an unusually clearly written academic article that is a practical guide to how a writing teacher could effectively respond to student compositions.  She and Lindemann stress lowering students’ affective filters by responding to their work by suggesting specific ways to improve it without highlighting what’ wrong with it. 

     In “Responding to Student Writing” the author writes that a computer was nicer in responding to student work than the humans who commented on the student writing:  “…the calm, reasonable language of the computer provided quite a contrast to the hostility and mean-spiritedness of most of the teachers’ comments.”  I’ve been guilty of mean-spiritedness in commenting on my students’ witting.   I should have known better than to make writing and revising a disliked activity.  Sommers’ idea that writing teachers should ignore small problems in early drafts and make individualized, particular suggestions for improvements is sound Skinnerian psychology, where the canny teacher extinguishes negative behavior and reinforces positive behaviors. 

     Writing, as Janet Emig suggests in “Writing as a Mode of Learning”, is the highest level of language acquisition.  Steven Krashen and Jim Cummins were the authorities in language acquisition when I got my masters in bilingual education in the early ’90s.  Their idea was that language is acquired pretty slowly and it’s most effectively acquired when the acquirer’s anxiety level is low, thereby lowering his affective filter, allowing more comprehensible input to be acquired.  Sommers’ suggests that the comments written on students’ drafts should be linked to in-class activities and direct instruction.  This re-enforcement of previously exposed concepts about revision will make teachers’ comments more comprehensible and more readily acquired.