Dear A—

Thank you very much for your essay! It was a pleasure to read.

We’ve talked throughout the quarter about the specific strengths found in your writing, such as your knack for writing a good introductory hook and your ability to transition between big ideas. Both of these strengths are very much present here. And what I’m particularly impressed with is some of the imagery that you use throughout, which really help in your efforts to flesh out and narrativize this feeling of being apprehenzled. For example:

My brain feels dead and everything around me seems to be drawing more of my attention away from what I’m asked to do.

Before starting, I made myself a hot cup of coffee to keep me awake. Meanwhile at the back of my mind, I thought  I could finish this paper without breaking a sweat and jump into the four day weekend, full of excitement and adventure. So I starting, placing my coffee on the center table in the living room and relaxed back on the luxurious sofa my dad bought just few weeks ago.

As well, there are quite a few lines in your essay that have a sophisticated clarity to them, such as:

I usually felt like when composed something, I knew precisely what my considerations and thoughts implied, yet the issue was, I expected that my audience did too.

The wording of this quote seemed a little strange to me but the idea couldn’t be more straightforward.

I can see that you’ve worked through the complex and ambiguous emotions that go along with reading and writing critically, and your entire essays reads like a kind of process of not only understanding the way that you feel about writing, but why you feel that way. This is important to the project, and helps emphasize in a direct way the new emotion that you’re illustrating.

While you showcase the usefulness of apprehenzled, I do think that your concluding paragraph could have benefitted from further thoughts on the direct application of that usefulness. It feels, to me, that your last two sentences begin to build up this idea, but cut off just before they are explained and analyzed in the way that you’ve done for the rest of the essay. Your final sentiment regarding generalizations of “bad writers” and what that really means is, I think, a stronger note to go out on. This has been successfully established and “proven” throughout your essay, and parallels your introductions in a way that “I try free writing or diagramming to inspire ideas” doesn’t quite do.

Overall, this is great work that shows your significant progress and improvement this quarter.

Assignment Complete

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Without a more in-depth rubric, and especially without further context of student A in the classroom,  it was difficult to know exactly what kind of feedback to give.  As a result, I imagined that this essay showed a marked improvement in A’s writing for the quarter, as well as previously discussed strengths that have been worked on and evolved.

My biggest difficulty in grading this paper, however, was my initial reaction to want to grade based on spelling/grammar. The same way that students expect to receive feedback on this, because they’ve been enmeshed in that style of grading for most of their lives, I also have an immediate gut reaction to think, “this is not acceptable writing, and I should correct some immediately wrong technicalities.” I don’t necessarily agree with this, especially in respect to the complete/incomplete mode that the class follows, but the instinct to correct and explain is still there.

Following the project requirements, however, I think that student A did a great job. There’s a lot of creativity present here, and a writing style that I feel takes the narratorial voice to a new level. Imagining that student A previously struggled with having this kind of voice, it wasn’t difficult to give the assignment a Complete.