WIP Feedback Strategies:  
          A Counterintuitive Approach  
          "Rather than sentence-level issues such as word choice, grammar, and punctuation," global concerns such as "how the student has developed and organized his or her ideas" are "more appropriately the focus of writing instruction in the disciplines." 
            -Bedford Guide to Teaching Writing in the Disciplines 35

          One of the benefits of WIP courses is that they give students ample opportunities to think in writing without penalty for being "wrong" in the conventional sense of mechanical "correctness" that usually overrides attention to global concerns such as how a student develops and organizes ideas. As all of us know, it is easy to spot surface errors in any written document, regardless of the purpose or stage of that piece of writing and how many other issues are more important at the time. Addressing development and organizing issues, central to ways of knowing in a discipline, admittedly, demands more of us than calling attention to sentence errors that are more appropriately addressed in editing and proofing. Development and organizing issues require more than a red pen "correction."  

          In general, your feedback strategies should reflect a relaxed attitude toward the sentence-level errors that students think writing is about in early stages and in writing to learn activities; you will adopt a more rigorous attitude toward error in editing and proofing stages and when students are turning in a formal paper at the end of the process. Furthermore, you will help students identify goals for each part of the writing process as a specific assignment engages it. That means concentrating on global issues of development and organization until planning, drafting, and revising processes help students to produce a draft that is firm and ready for latter-stage revision, editing, and proofing.  

          The role of sentence-level issues in a WIP course 
          Surprisingly for some WIP participants, providing feedback is not about correcting student errors. Our advice is to put grammar, punctuation, and usage issues in their proper place in a writing in the disciplines course. They are most usefully addressed as issues important to latter stages of the writing process. Writing in the disciplines is not about "grammar across the curriculum" or "making spelling count in a biology paper" (Paul Connolly, "Writing and the Ecology of Learning"  5 ). As the Bedford argues, global issues are the main concern of writing in the disciplines instruction, and concentrating on them as they engage the writing conventions of a field is more than enough to handle in a WIP course.  

          Though it is useful to point out serious errors and to note error patterns (misuse of key terms, inaccuracies with key data, for example), "correcting" student work at any stage of the process is an inefficient use of faculty time and expertise. The Bedford points out that students themselves could spot approximately half of their errors if given another chance to review their papers. Furthermore, when instructors give in to the tendency to over-mark student work, they simply reinforce the idea that surface errors are what writing is about. Over-concern with error in student writing "unintentionally reinforces error" (Donald Murray, "Teaching the Other Self" 146). Just as troublesome, when instructors mark everything that could be addressed in a piece of student writing -- and all of us know there is plenty to work on -- they simply confuse students who can't decipher what the most important two or three things to do next might be.  

          Fewer and more focused comments 
          In addition, writing research indicates that students can process only three-to-five negative comments per page; more than that, they cease to read, and the chance to communicate with them is lost. For reasons such as these and others that we will return to, the WIP encourages a counterintuitive approach to feedback in all stages. We suggest that instructors not only grade less than they think they have to, but also mark less yet more strategically. As part of this approach, we also encourage you to step outside of limiting commenting patterns that dominate "teacherly" responses to student writing. Scribbling "AWK" or some of the other responding cliches all over a paper doesn't help a student's writing process very much.  

          Why we have to be counterintuitive 
          Given the dominant orientation to writing as "correctness" based upon tricky rules that only English teachers can explain, and based upon years of red marks about wrong words and misused commas on their papers, students think writing effectively is getting words in the right place and avoiding errors. This orientation is reinforced by many things, such as the belief that "good writing" appears magically and perfectly error-free for individuals who have a gift for doing it, as well as by the ways that instructors, unless specifically trained to do so, respond to student writing (often the way our own papers were responded to, for good or ill). WIP instructors have to resist this tendency to focus on the wrong things at the wrong time. In a study of feedback and the actual revisions presumed connected to it, sentence-level issues, rather than the global concerns most appropriate to writing in the disciplines instruction, drove instructors' feedback to students (Larry Beason, "Feedback and Revision in Writing Across the Curriculum Classes" 416). Peer feedback in the study also focused on sentence-level revisions, rather than on development and organization. It's not surprising that only only a small percentage of actual student revisions, the study found, were at a global level. Admittedly, WIP interest in global issues does not mean that help with sentence-level revision is not what some students need most. Our point is that there is a best stage in which to address such revisions. 
           
          Ways of being counterintuitive in your feedback approach  

          • Remember that not all student writing needs a written response. 

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          • Consider first the kind and purpose of the writing and where it is in the process. 

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          • Put your pen down. 

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          • Resist marking easy, surface issues. 

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          • Focus on global concerns in early stages; sentence-level issues in latter stages, and grammar, punctuation, and usage in latter stages as matter of credibility. 

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          • Remember that the writing conventions are probably going to be global issues, the reasons for passive voice or for a certain format relate to ways of developing, organizing, and presenting information in a field. 

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          • Don't "bleed" on papers. 

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          • Don't "correct" papers. 

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          • Don't wait until you have "writing" (chunks of prose) to help or intervene in the process;  students become over-committed to their words on paper. 

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          • Resist the tendency to freewrite on student papers or to do the kind of writing that suggests haste, irritation, lack of planning. 

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          • Think about what will be the best ways to give feedback to students: a few comments in class, messages on their papers or an attached feedback sheet, email, conferences, handouts. 

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          • Get work back to students promptly and sooner than they expect it.
           
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            • Michelle Ballif