"Responding to Student Writing" by Nancy Sommers

In the academic article “Responding to Student Writing”, the author Nancy Sommers emphasizes on the methods teachers approach when revising student’s writing. Her main concern in this article is the techniques commonly used by teachers in revising student’s writing and whether or not these techniques are helpful to the student.

The author used various revised essays to address the issue in hand. With the help of her colleagues, Lil Brannon and Cyril Knoblach, Nancy Sommers studied for a year many comments from teachers on these revised papers. They focused on noting approaches of thirty-five teachers from the universities of New York and Oklahoma. All of the teachers had to critique the same set of student essays. They interviewed students and teacher of different universities in their approach to revision. Nancy and her colleagues also used software called “Writer’s Workbench” through which the program would analyze and suggest any grammar errors and sentence type, among other characteristics. The results were measured in two categories: the styles of commenting, and the practicality of these styles.

As the author explains, revision is mostly seen as a structural, rule following pattern to teachers and students. It is extremely important that revision (commenting) becomes an approach of untangling ideas and guiding students to shape (not change) the main idea that is being expressed. Commenting on any genre of writing helps the writer know if the intended idea was communicated effectively to the reader. This helps the writer evaluate and develop new techniques that will assist in the next writing.

In one of the methods, the author points out that teachers tend to appropriate text when commenting on student’s essays. This appropriation of text denotes an isolation of a single problem in the student’s essays instead of approaching the essay as an entire discourse. Nonspecific comments and grammatical correction in early drafts diverts the student from the main idea of the essay, to only concentrating on grammatical errors. This gives the student the false final draft idea needing minimal correction only.

This study showed the author that there is a problem in the process and product of revision. The reader should respond to this article as an insight to improving essay revision. These approaches to commenting can be used to proofread writing with a set objective. Commenting and revision should help clarify the purpose of an essay instead of spotting grammar errors.