A Reader's Checklist for Mentors

Many are the ways to respond to a student's written work. Most graduate mentors have done a fair bit of academic writing in their own careers so they will often comment on a paper the same way their writing was critiqued when they were students. In fact, it is difficult to convince highly educated people over the age of 45 that the art of giving feedback on student writing has come a long way in the last 30 years. There's a whole academic discipline, called Composition and Rhetoric, that's developed new methods to help you help your students learn to write more professionally. But to profit from these well researched methods, we have to give up on the idea that a) grad students should already know how to write well and we shouldn't have to coach them, and b) giving writing feedback means editing, aka correcting, student writing.

Today's students, even adult learners, were raised in homes and schools where reading and writing had to share time with t.v., movies, video games, HIV-prevention and anti-drug counseling, and after-school jobs. The 20-40-something graduate student is not less literate than before, but she has to be literate in many more media and content areas today than was once true. Research writing is a specific set of skills that take time to develop and a writing-intensive graduate program may be the student's best opportunity to gain those skills through a highly interactive writing process involving you, the mentor. The best way to help a student improve her or his research writing is to require it (making the parameters for each writing assignment as concrete as possible) and then provide timely, specific feedback as a discriminating reader (not editor).

Therefore, the next time you receive an intermediate draft from a student who is asking for your opinion/evaluation/approval, do not pop open the document in track changes and begin to rewrite the paper in the image of your favorite journal article. Rather, use the comments function in your word-processing app to respond to the draft as a reader so that the writer can see from your comments and questions how you experience the draft as an informed reader. You can use a scoring rubric you've picked up somewhere or a checklist (see below) to keep you focused on interacting with the draft rather than prosecuting it. Resist the temptation to fall back on summary judgments ("Awkward" or "Great point!") as a substitute for engaging with the student's argument and how s/he is making it. A student needs much more than your applause or disapproval to learn what works in writing as opposed to what does not. And isn't competency in the scholarly conversation, written and spoken, what you want for your students?

It is easy to find graduate writing rubrics on the web these days and not all are of equal quality. Ask the writing coaches at the PC Learning Commons for suggestions if using a rubric to guide your feedback interests you. There is a time for corrections and summative evaluation of final drafts but you will find it less painful when you know how to coach your students to create better finished products. For intermediate drafts, you can use this all-purpose reader's checklist to help you ask the right questions as you are reading, whether it's a great draft or a weak one. In the process, you might learn a thing or two about your own writing, compounding the benefits of learning to critique writing as an art developed for students of the 21st century.

A Reader’s Checklist

      Because reading is difficult work, writers are obligated to meet certain standards that engage readers and reward them for their attention. For example, readers need key sentences that direct their attention to important points; these sentences must be written to reveal the writer’s thought, not to obscure it. Readers appreciate correct spelling and punctuation because these are signs of respect from the writer. Readers also expect the writer to be knowledgeable on the topic and to use a tone that fits the purpose and occasion of the document. A careful reader will ask these questions of a draft and shape her or his feedback accordingly:

  

When I read the paper does it…

·         Reflect an awareness of who the writer is writing for and why? 

·         Focus on the assignment and topic without straying into irrelevant material? 

·         Have a significant and interesting focal point or thesis I could easily paraphrase? 

·         Provide me with credible details, examples, arguments, or other kinds of to evidence to support the thesis statement? 

·         Offer verbal and typographical cues to help me follow the information the writer has chosen to present? 

·         Contain clear, logical sentences that motivate me to read on? 

·         Avoid wordiness, clichés, pat phrases, and repetition? 

·         Contain words I can be expected to understand? 

·         Show respect for my time by being carefully proofread for spelling, typographical, formatting, and punctuation errors?

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Context as Everything by Skye Anicca

From a young age we learn to understand and categorize the world through knowledge of context (The goat goes in the ___? Barn. The  doctor goes in the ___? Hospital). In any situation where rhetoric, or persuasion, is at play, there is a specific setting that helps you make sense of that situation. (Challenge question: Try to think of a situation involving communication where persuasion is not a factor.)

Consider how our very lives sit within what feels like an enormous, invisible container—the universe. We can’t readily define it in layperson’s terms, but for most of us, the word universe is enough to convey a specific entity. We also understand that the concept of “the universe” is incredibly general, that our everyday experiences—shopping, eating, studying—are all suspended within it: the context of all human life, therefore, is the universe. Equally true would be to say that the context of our lives is the earth, or our nation, or our family. Clearly, contexts may be perceived from wider and narrower vantage points. Context is the bubble—the everything (for us the universe or the earth, our nation or our family)—that frames or gives definition to the rhetorical situation.

One of the more obvious examples of rhetoric in our daily lives is the advertisement. Picture a billboard featuring a split panel: on one side is a well-dressed African-American woman riding the subway to work; on the second side is the same woman, wearing the same high-heeled shoes, dancing on a crowded dance floor. The text is the advertisement. The author is the shoe company. The purpose is to sell versatile shoes. The audience is likely modern, middle-class (upper class women are less likely to need double-duty footwear) American or Western European working women. As a college student who doesn't wear high-heels,you might not glance twice at this ad. However, imagine if this were 1950 and you were a Caucasian, middle-class housewife who had miraculously stumbled upon this advertisement. What might your reaction be? Likely you'd be scandalized, scrambling to decide which was more shocking—a woman working in heels, an African-American woman on an “integrated” train, or a woman dancing unescorted. Consider the same advertisement making its way to a small village in southern Mexico where  people still travel twenty miles by burro to the market to sell their wares. What would these people make of our billboard? The very different reactions of "readers" in these imagined settings dramatically demonstrate how context, as large and as difficult to describe as it is, does indeed affect the way messages are created and received. 

To apply this understanding of context to your writing, consider that the “everything” of a situation will determine all other aspects of the persuasive triangle: your purpose, your audience, even how you portray yourself as author/speaker/artist. As students, the context for your writing will often be academic. This means that to write well in that setting, you’ll need to be alert to the large and small elements that comprise the academic environment, those aspects of the context that will influence your rhetorical decisions. 

An understanding of context as the bubble that gives shape and meaning to our rhetoric has applications far beyond academic writing. Such an understanding allows us to creatively, compassionately, and effectively communicate with one another in a complex, demanding, and ever-changing world. 

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Be Timely, Specific, Positive in Your Written Feedback by Bev Santo

The handwritten words “GOOD WORK!” loitered on the cover page of my 22-page research paper. The paper had made a leisurely trip in an 8- by 10-inch manila envelope from me to my mentor and back again. Eager to find out more about how the paper had been received I quickly flipped through the pages looking for my mentor's comments. But not a single drop of ink decorated, highlighted, or conversed with the black type of my carefully considered paragraphs. I had spent hours, days, and weeks researching and constructing this paper. The near silence I received in return was deafening.

Fortunately, I wasn’t completely unprepared for this lack of usable feedback. When I met my graduate mentor for the first time she had asked, “Are you self-directed?” As a graduate of Prescott College, a single mom, and a full-time educator, I assured her I was. 

“Good,” she said. “This job supports my real profession which is writing. If you’re not self-directed I can’t work with you.”

Three months later when I received her two-word response to my first paper, my mentor's definition of 'self-directed' became as clear as bottled water. When I had assured her I was self-directed, I meant that I was motivated and personally engaged in my learning, ready to take responsibility for the writing, reading, and research that lay ahead. I thought that the mentor's role was to walk beside the self-directed student, coaching, facilitating, being a part of the support crew, and providing resources, feedback, and encouragement. Sure, as a student I would do the heavy lifting of being fully engaging in my own intellectual growth and goal-setting. That the mentor would respond to my writing helpfully I took for granted.

Twenty-five years of teaching, learning, and mentoring have passed since that experience in graduate school. In that time I have developed a rule of thumb regarding providing written feedback to undergraduate and graduate students when they do the hard work of writing a formal paper. The rule has three parts:

• Be timely.
• Be specific.
• Be positive. 

What it means to be timely has changed since the advent of the internet but it is a good idea for all mentors to think about what timely means from the student's perspective. Today's mentor might worry that 'timely' means 'immediate' to some students. That means it is best to let students know what kind of turn around time to expect on a paper or draft so that there are no misunderstandings later. For a standard assignment in MAP, mentors should ask students to allow one to two weeks for a mentor to respond with questions, comments, and encouragement written directly on the paper. One to two weeks is plenty of time to give substantive feedback rather than just a thumbs up or thumbs down, either of which minimizes the student's efforts.

If you struggle to give students feedback in a timely manner, reflect on on the barriers to your doing so, i.e. what's causing you to postpone feedback to a student who is eagerly awaiting your comments? Do you feel that you must rewrite or heavily edit each draft you receive? Are you avoiding the task of responding to a student because you dread hurting the student's feelings by pointing out the paper's flaws? Do you feel unqualified to give the student specific, constructive advice on writing? 

In the next post on my feedback rule of thumb, we'll discuss ways to be specific in your feedback that will help your students without drowning you in thankless work. Once you get the hang of giving your students effective writing feedback that empowers them to revise thoughtfully, you may find it easier to be more timely with your much appreciated responses. 

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Purposeful Writing

Writers must have a purpose in mind when they begin to write, even before they consider the nature of their intended audience. Ask most college students why they write papers and most will tell you that the purpose of their latest paper was to meet the requirements of a particular course. Even in a highly experiential curriculum, some amount of formal writing, often research-based writing, is required. So the purpose of academic writing is, at heart, to please your teachers and get to the promised land of that diploma, right? 

Well, partly. But writing to pass a course isn't the most exciting reason to write and that external reward you're seeking may actually be making it harder for you to get the writing done. That's because we are typically more motivated--i.e. purposeful--when we are intrinsically motivated rather than driven by external demands or requirements.

So why write that paper or thesis chapter that's due by the end of the semester? Among the best intrinsic reasons are these:

• "I have something important to say or teach to a particular audience on the topic I've selected."
  
• "Writing this paper will allow me to analyze or synthesize what I've learned from my research/fieldwork/reading this semester so that I can retain it better."
  
• "My writing will bring new questions/answers/issues into focus for my audience that are not expressed elsewhere in the literature."

The purpose of this post is to remind you that every successful piece of expository writing has a unique purpose of which the writer is fully aware. First, the effective writer decides what work her or his piece of writing must do in the world by answering the question "What do I want to accomplish with the words in this paper?" Only then can the writer contemplate "Who do I want to reach with my writing?" which leads to the equally important question of audience awareness. 

Without a goal beyond filling the page or meeting a requirement, your writing is bound to be dreary and difficult. Make academic writing more fun by selecting topics and themes that are meaningful to you and that serve a purpose you are passionate about. Finding your purpose for a piece of writing needs to happen near the beginning of your writing process--it is not something you can 'revise in'. 

To get started on setting intrinsic goals for a paper, chapter, or thesis, talk out your intent with a writing coach before you begin to write in earnest. This is a great way to encourage yourself to do important work with words and meet your deadlines.

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