This is based on Student C’s short essay:

Hello C-Train,

I really enjoyed reading your response to Rose’s article. You seem to be finding a way to maintain your unique voice when you’re writing. I especially enjoyed the way you reflected on the difficulties you have had adjusting to a second language.

The line “I always try to sound better in essays than I do in person” stood out to me as a reader. It can be difficult for any writer to find their voice while also trying to follow all the rules we associate with writing. Dislodging some of those set rules as we draft can help us sound more authentic in our writing. You have started finding what is unique in your voice, as stated earlier, but you might be facing some limitations, self-imposed or otherwise, that is holding you back from sounding as articulate on the page as you do in person. What I see in this paper is a person with many great ideas who struggles at times to build them into a coherent argument.

In the future, I would consider reading your work aloud, either to yourself or to a friend you trust, and considering whether your argument follows a steady path as it progresses or if it tends to wander a bit. You seem to be making an argument in paragraph one that you need a rubric for an assignment, but you conflate that with the Rose article’s distinction between a heuristic and an algorithm you mention at the start of the essay. Paragraphs 2 and 3 offer a more precise argument about the Rose article. My guess is that you started finding your ideas in the drafting process after you completed paragraph one, but then you did not go back and change the opening to reflect the rest of the essay.

Overall, you have so many great insights in this essay that I hesitate to give you anything but a complete score. However, I think the essay could even better if all the pieces fit together. Try revising the opening paragraph by focusing on how it can begin the argument that continues later in the text, then read your essay aloud and consider how well a reader could follow your line of thinking.

Keep up the good work!

 

Reflection:

I think it’s more important to be positive when working with an ELL student than to offer a deep critique of their grammar and syntax. ELL students tend to be more discouraged about writing than first language students, so making them think that they are making progress is paramount.

I also wanted to give this student a fairly clear revision plan so that I could see how they go about changing this part of the essay. To be honest, this essay needs a lot more change than what I’m suggesting, but telling the student to fix everything might cause them to fix nothing. My hope would be that this student would try to do the revision I’m suggesting, and that would tell me a lot about this person as a student and a writer.