Hi Student B,

First and foremost, I really enjoyed reading your essay, and the term gratention is one that I think many individuals can relate to on a personal level. In grade school, there’s always a heavy emphasis on “pulling the reader in,” as if the first two sentences will determine whether or not the reader will immediately walk away. It’s an extreme amount of pressure, and I can empathize with your connections to a well-developed topic sentence and writer’s block. I too struggled with the same aspects, and oftentimes put off my writing for great lengths of time as if a good “hook” would suddenly spring forth in my head. Your own experience as a writer was very well thought out, and I could clearly make out your frustrations through the text.

I appreciated your use of Rose’s essay in connection with gratention, and you successfully incorporated multiple quotes into your work with the appropriate quotation and page numbers. That being said, I would have liked to see more analysis after each quotation. In each paragraph where you introduce Rose’s main points, you summarize what the author is saying, but don’t necessarily detail the informational structure that will help the reader’s interpretation. I know that analysis of your chosen author wasn’t on the rubric, but it is a good skill to have for college papers down the road.

Think of it this way— imagine an iceberg sitting in the sea. You know that there’s more than what’s on display above the water, so therefore you must explore what’s “beneath the surface”. For some students, having a visual aid helps to remember the importance of underlying themes and ideas that are connected implicitly through word choice. The “iceberg theory” or the “theory of omission” (that was coined by Ernest Hemingway), is a popular approach for both teachers and students. Again, the analysis wasn’t in the formal requirements, but keep the iceberg theory in mind for future papers. For this particular paper, analysis might have helped you connect your emotions in respect to Rose’s article.

I’m giving you a complete on this assignment, but I would like you to try and incorporate some analysis in papers for the future. Overall, wonderful job, and if you would like some further help going forward, don’t hesitate to drop by my office hours.

Best,

Allison

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I actually found it pretty fun to give feedback on a student I’ve never met! It was a fun challenge in that I was had to judge them solely by their writing and meeting the requirements. In a way though, it was a little odd writing feedback to someone’s work that they are never going to read. And in some moments of writing my feedback, I kept trying to convince myself that this wasn’t a waste of my time.

When I read my students work, I already know who they are as individuals and I know exactly how their writing progresses based on the feedback I give them. For this project, I treated the response as if I were reading the first project my students ever submitted. For Project 1, I gave a little too much feedback, which is exactly what I did in this case. A general rule for my responses is that I’ll give a few positive notes on their writing before the critiques, and I always give them tips to move forward in their next project.