I read Student B’s Writing Emotions Essay, here is the feedback I would give to this student: 

“Hey Student B! 

For starters, I love your creativity in the emotion you came up with: Gratention. I think we can all agree that writing an interesting hook or pulling your audience into your essay from the first sentence is a stressful and frustrating thing to accomplish. This requires a good amount of thought and contemplation which is often overwhelming. I liked how you began this essay with a personal anecdote about your own struggles when writing introductions, and how you mentioned learning about the importance of great topic-sentences and hooks as a child. This appears to have been a sort of traumatic experience for you- learning about the importance of hooks, but never feeling accomplished with your own. I’m sorry to hear this, but I’m glad you looked to Mike Rose’s essay to see that you are not alone in this struggle! We all have troubles feeling confident in our writing.  

You used Rose’s essay well when explaining your writer’s block, but I think you could have implemented his essay, or another reading from class, to discuss more plausible cures for gratention. You did mention some possible cures, but ideally, you would have backed these up with some textual evidence. I know that writing assignments with rigid rules might seem to suck the creativity out of the piece, but there are numerous ways to still be creative while following the prompts/rules of “good writing!” Lastly, I appreciated your mention of brainstorming and writing the beginning of your essay last as possible solutions to overcoming this feeling of gratention. I often recommend writing the intro paragraph last, because it’s easier to tell your reader what your paper is about after you’ve wrote it. And brainstorming is always a useful technique to explore your topic and web out some possible ideas. Overall, I enjoyed reading your essay Student B, it was creative and had a great introduction! The feeling of gratention is tough, but you’re already making great strides in overcoming it!” 

This was a bit of a challenging essay for me to give feedback on. I’m not entirely confident in my choices and am afraid I might have been a bit too nice and not critical enough. But at the same time, I really worry about tearing apart essays from writers who are already dejected and insecure about their work. I think Student B did a good job, it could have been better of course, but they followed the prompt, used a couple quotes from the reading, and added personal anecdotes to back up their feeling of gratention. Clearly, some grammar, sentence structure, diction, and flow could all be improved, but I find it more useful to focus on big-picture feedback rather than line by line edits. One thing that was very difficult for me in providing feedback to this student was a lack of rubric. I rely heavily on grading with a rubric because it provides a stable platform of standards for each essay to hold-up to, so not having one was unusual for me.