Several years ago, a colleague showed me an essay that he said demonstrated the poor quality of his students’ writing. On the first page, below a large “F” circled with such force that the paper had been torn, he had written, “This is pathetic. Thanks for wasting both our time.” The essay was covered in ink (red, naturally), and every marginal and interlineal comment was negative. On one page, underlining the student’s words “I feel,” he had written, “I want to know what you think. I don’t give a rat’s ass what you ‘feel.’”
Although you certainly can’t tell from those comments, this was a teacher who by all other measures cared deeply for his students and their learning. Did he truly think his student would be motivated by such harsh remarks? Or was he merely venting his frustration at what he saw as shoddy work?
Either way, I’d like to believe that kind of severe condemnation of student writing is rare among faculty members. But while my colleague’s colorful language may be unusual, his tone of angry indignation is all too familiar.
In a landmark 1982 study of teacher responses to student writing, Nancy Sommers and her fellow researchers found that “most” of the comments they analyzed were characterized by “hostility and mean-spiritedness.” Since then, scholarship in instructor response has advanced our understanding of what characterizes effective written feedback, and writing programs have helped spread the word.
But the negativity that Sommers described has not gone away — not in my experience. Too often I have come across scornful comments like these, all directed at undergraduate writers:
- “You’ll never survive here [in college].”
- “I’m disgusted.”
- And this one-word assessment: “Garbage.”
To be sure, many students do not work hard on our assignments or listen carefully to our instructions. But antipathy is unlikely to motivate them to do better; on the contrary, it may convince them to give up.
The power of negativity may explain why students entering my first-year composition course have such a bleak attitude toward writing.
What’s more, mangled syntax, disordered thinking, and frequent error happen to be hallmarks of a novice writer learning a new discourse. If we incorrectly assume they reflect a lack of effort or character — and base our feedback on that assumption — we do our students a disservice and risk inflicting real damage.
It takes enormous amounts of time and mental energy to craft substantive, constructive comments that will truly help students learn. A much faster way to get through a stack of student papers is to focus solely on what is deficient. But students pay the price for our excessive negativity.
Roy F. Baumeister, a professor of social psychology at Florida State University, has shown that negative emotions have a much bigger impact than positive ones. We dwell more on negative comments, and give them more weight, he says, and they take longer to wear off: “Bad emotions, bad parents, and bad feedback have more impact than good ones. Bad impressions and bad stereotypes are quicker to form and more resistant to disconfirmation than good ones.”
In short, a little criticism goes a long way.
The power of negativity may explain why students entering my first-year composition course have such a bleak attitude toward writing. Virtually all of them say they dislike writing and are bad at it.
How do they know their writing is bad? They have been told so — repeatedly, sometimes over many years. One student, clearly moved after I praised one of her essays, told me she had never heard a teacher say anything positive about her writing before. How can we expect students to undertake the hard work of composing and revising if we only find fault in what they write?
Probably nothing we do as teachers has as much impact on students’ learning as the way we respond to their writing.
That is not to say that praise — especially if it is unwarranted — always constitutes a feature of effective feedback. But certainly we need to bracket our irritation before composing a response, no matter how inept we find the writing. We risk very little if we assume a student is a good person and has written in good faith.
The stakes are high: Probably nothing we do as teachers has as much impact on students’ learning as the way we respond to their writing. For evidence of that, we need only watch their faces when we return their marked-up papers. Or, better yet, watch how we ourselves behave when we read our feedback aloud to a student — how we soften a harsh tone or rationalize a testy remark. Face to face with our students, we realize how distant they seemed to us when we scribbled comments on their paper, and just how vulnerable they are to our barbs.
It also helps to remember why we take the time to craft comments — often late at night or deep into our weekends. Sure, we hope to show inexperienced writers how to improve the text at hand. But more important, our goal is to help them develop habits and skills they can use all their lives. That has to entail some degree of encouragement, especially for students who struggle with writing or who appear not to care. If we can’t muster a few supportive words for those writers, at least we should do them no harm.