Feedback

Dear Student A,

The following includes my feedback on your “Writing Emotions” assignment and also some more general thoughts about how we develop our writing practice and habits. As is always the case, please let me know if you would like me to clarify any of my thoughts.

Your descriptions of feeling apprehenzled created a very vivid sensation for me as a reader. Your statement on how your brain feels dead (this is a nice way to take a common and sort of boring phrase “brain dead” and rework it to give it new life) and how everything seems to be drawing you away from what you’re supposed to do felt very real and also relatable to my own experience. I like that you expanded on your synonyms and definition of apprehenzled as the essay continued. I first just expected a combination of apprehension and puzzled, but you add pressure, frenzy, confusion, anxiety etc. You’ve given the reader a lot of insight into your personal experience and what’s going on inside your head in these moments, which helps make this a more engaging read.

I also liked the rhythm of your writing. You weave your thoughts together in a pretty continuous manner so that the sentences sort of topple onto one another and add to this feeling of anxiety and stress. Here’s an example that stuck out to me: “it’s the feeling of anxiety and confusion. I get this feeling of frenzy. A fixing in your gut. Nerves. I stall out on the first paragraph or worst, the first sentence. My mind begins whispering, “Not great enough,” and I want to scrap everything.” And then you jump right into:

Apprenhenzled!

What a cool move! In this instance you very effectively tie together fragmented feelings and thoughts in a way that reflects the stressed out writing experience. Your descriptions of your experience draw the reader in, but your sentence and paragraph construction/structure does as well.

The other side of this engaging fragmented feeling is when your sentence structure doesn’t fit together very well. Rather than woven together it seems sort of duct taped together or something less seamless. This is pretty vague so here’s an example: “At the moment, I can’t feel them so I would rather focus on what I feel now. In fact, to be totally honest with myself, I have never woke a single day in my recent memory in which I jumped of bed just dying to put pen to paper and write something.” I definitely understand what these sentences are saying but there’s disagreement between the parts of the sentences that are pretty distracting and required a second look. I wonder if some of these odd disagreements are left over from a rough draft or freewrite. Often when I write, in the beginning stages I’ll create problems for myself by doing the following: I will start a sentence and then think of some slight variation that I prefer to the original sentence. In a rush I’ll change one part of the sentence but then ignore the other, so that one part of the sentence still reflects the original meaning & structure, while the other corresponds to the new meaning. I’ll end up with a random “because” or “participating participation” or something weird like this. This is the origin of at least some of my own confusing sentences, and I can usually iron these out in later drafts, or if I get other people’s eyes on my writing. One very general piece of advice is to get as much feedback as you can. Ask your peers to look at your writing. Write a draft and then wait a day until you look at it again. Read your sentences out loud! I think you’ll notice these inconsistencies. You mention that you thought Mike Rose used funny wording in one of the quotes you insert. I think this displays a natural intuition for these sorts of structural assessments.

 

You touched on this necessity for feedback pretty explicitly in your essay which was a nice personal finding. I appreciated your references to Rose’s writing. I won’t go too much into this but I do want to say that I think you’ve created your own rigid rule for yourself when you mention you want to create writing that is both jaw-dropping and eye-opening. I think that these are unrealistic goals to impose on everything you write. How do you measure jaw-dropping? I assume you don’t literally mean you want every reader’s jaws to drop. I think you’ll find that your writing experience will become more fluid and less anxiety inducing if you rework these goals. It’s good to set high standards for yourself, but I think you’ll find yourself in more situations like the one you describe about the high school gun control essay. I don’t have a substitute goal for you at this point, but I will say to think about what you appreciate about writing as a reader. Do you always want to have your mind blown? Or do you sometimes appreciate other aspects of writing?

Very briefly, I really enjoyed reading this.

Your “Writing Emotions” project is Complete.

Reflection:

I hoped that piece of feedback would reflect the evaluations I’ve sent to my students. I think realistically that this would more accurately reflect an early stage project eval, one of the first or second I send along as opposed to the products of burnt out jaded Joey grader. I think that this piece of feedback focuses more on sentence structure and cohesion than my other evals do, which I think is a product of working off of less context than I have for my class, and less of a rubric than I provide to my students. I think that the lack of context was the main difficulty I encountered with this assignment, and pushed me to reference my old standards of correctness (structural flow, cohesion, grammar etc.) I generally try to keep my feedback broad, and I do my best to be encouraging in all of my feedback. One worry I have is that I’m not giving any tangible constructive feedback because of my aversion to ‘correctness’ and that my students end up without any real takeaways. That’s a line I felt like I walked in this eval, and a line I walk in other evals.