Responding vs. Proofreading:
Roles for Responding to Student Writing
One way to help us think about the
role we play when we respond to our students' writing is to define our
roles as responders. Here are some possible roles we as teachers can play
when we respond to our students' writing:
Examiner: The "teacher as
examiner" is looking for a correct answer-a specific answer that the
teacher already knows. Often in quizzes or short answer exams the teacher
plays the role of examiner. The examiner role can be limiting for both the
student and the teacher because there is no dialogue between the writer
and responder. The student is writing to display what she knows to an
examiner, not to communicate to a reader.
Proofreader: A teacher playing the role of proofreader focuses on sentence-level correctness in her response. All experienced writers proofread their text, but merely proofreading student writing gives them the impression that surface correctness is more important than critical thinking or developing and supporting ideas. Most writers would be frustrated by readers who only respond to grammar and mechanics and don't respond to their ideas, unless they are turning in a final draft of a manuscript to an editor.
Interested Reader: An "interested reader" is the role we play when we
read texts for pleasure and for our own purposes, and the kind of readers
we most often imagine when we write. Interested readers are not focused on
just criticizing and judging writers or marking errors in grammar, but
interested readers do evaluate what they're reading and think about where
they agree or disagree with the author. Interested readers are looking for
what is working well in a piece of writing, and not just what isn't
working. A text that has repeated errors in grammar and mechanics that
interfere with communication will certainly bother even the most
interested reader, but grammar won't be the focus of an interested
reader's response to a text unless surface errors are so overwhelming that
the text isn't comprehensible.
Representative of a Discourse
Community: As college teachers we are helping initiate students to the
ways of thinking and making meaning in our discipline, and one stance we
can take when we respond is as representatives of our "discourse
communities"—the rhetorical communities of readers and writers in our
discipline. In this role our primary responsibility as responders is to
help student learn to make and support arguments in ways that are
appropriate for our field, to conduct discipline-specific inquiry and
research, and to integrate and synthesize other scholars' ideas and
research. Correct citation of sources or the correct use of edited English
for Academic Purposes (EAP) is a part of communicating in our disciplines,
but most of use would agree that the quality of our thinking and research
is more important in our own work as scholars than the surface correctness
of our prose.
Wider Audience: One way to get out of the "teacher as examiner" rut is to ask students to write for a hypothetical wider audience, and to role-play that wider audience when you respond. For example, students could write reports to government organizations or a company's Board of Directors, feature articles for magazines or newspapers, book reviews for journals or Amazon.com, manuals or brochures aimed at the wider public, or Web sites with resources for future students. In each of these scenarios, the teacher can respond as the intended audience, and create a rhetorical situation that's much more engaging than the student writing to the "teacher as examiner."
I would argue that the most helpful roles teachers can play as responders
to student writing are the kinds of roles we expect from readers of our
own scholarly and public writing. We write for interested readers, or to
communicate with other scholars in our discourse communities, or to inform
or persuade a wider audience beyond academia. We would be discouraged by a
journal editor who only marked grammatical errors on an article we
submitted, and we would consider pedantic a book reviewer who focused her
comments on typos or grammar errors in the novel she was reviewing.
Teaching our students the importance of editing and proofreading in order
to communicate effectively to an audience is a part of what we do as
responders, but I would argue that responding to the quality of our
students' thinking is our primary responsibility as readers of our
students' writing and representatives of our disciplines.
Dan Melzer
University Reading and Writing Coordinator