(Student B, Project 2)

You really got what this project was about! You center “gratention” around your own experiences, both through what you were taught in elementary school and in your writing experience as you grapple with your introductions. Not only is “gratention” a perfect word to relate to understanding you as a writer, you’ve also tied it in very thoroughly with Mike Rose’s essay. You do an excellent job of introducing the reader to what his article is about and why what he has to say is important. You’ve made him a co-author, not just a resource! Then you also very effectively relate what he has to say to your new emotion. Always make sure, though, that you’re citing other people’s ideas completely: I didn’t see any page numbers for the quotes you used from Rose. The other suggestion I have for you to help refine your writing is to simply try reading your drafts out loud to yourself or to someone else. Often, hearing your writing out loud can help you spot sentences that could flow more smoothly or where a word has been left out—allowing you to make some little fixes without even needing to know the exact grammatical “rules” that apply. Not only did you write a great essay for this specific prompt, your writing and the way you developed the complexity of your ideas has really grown since project one. Well done!

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It’s somewhat challenging to give feedback to a student that I don’t know personally, especially when the work is being judged pass/fail against a general prompt rather than closely evaluated against a rubric or for specific writing quality parameters. When I grade my own students, I have the context of their freewrites and their personal letters and their literacy narratives—all of which help give me something of an idea of what my students think their strengths and weaknesses are, which in turn helps me focus my feedback on what I think may be most useful to them. When I’m grading students who are particularly insecure or even feel downright negatively about their writing, my highest priority is to make sure they feel seen and heard—which is how I directed my feedback here. I’m concerned that students may feel in college like either their work isn’t important to their instructor, who has other students to grade and things to do; or, that they feel their work isn’t seen for the value it does have, but only as the fulfillment (or not) of a rubric. I try to communicate that I was specifically engaged with their writing and with considering them as a student. In this feedback, that meant calling attention to the specific word they invented and to their writing experiences, lauding the ways their work was attentive to the prompt, and referring to their growth since project one.

I also think it’s always important to give students direction to grow, even if they completed the assignment (as I think this essay did). With a grading contract, it doesn’t feel particularly useful to spend a lot of time on grammar/syntax feedback, since I haven’t necessarily given them any instructional context in the class by which to really understand and apply it. However, reading work aloud is an easy way to spot problem areas even if you don’t totally understand what’s problematic about them. I recommend reading their drafts aloud to a lot of my students—from the excellent writers to the novices.