Let me start by recapping a few of the key points about responding to student writers from the previous video. Nancy Sommers, in her book, Responding to Student Writers, includes these key points. Prioritize your comments. Over-commenting overwhelms both the student and the teacher. Focus on the three or four most important things you want the students to know about this paper. Help students learn how to understand and use comments. Treat commenting as a dialogue. Be honest, but speak in a tone that shows you want the student to succeed. Sommers point out the comments should be appropriate to the draft. For instance, she says, an early draft is a work in progress. Its ideas are still in flux and are still being formed and tested. The writers of early drafts need nurturing, encouragement, and honest assessment to see where they stumble and where they succeed. On the other hand, with final drafts, final draft comments need both to evaluate the strengths and limitations of the current paper and to provide transportable lessons for future assignments. She suggests that teachers' responses should help students understand what they are doing well. Start by focusing on global comments. Let students retain ownership. Respond to what the student is trying to say and try to help that student say it better rather than deciding what you want the student to do. Phrase comments in such a way as to encourage revision. Often put it in the form of questions. These comments can be most helpful. Your tone should be encouraging. Prioritize your comments for the students so that they understand which are the most important. Point your comments forward either to the next draft or to the next writing assignment. I often pause after writing a response and try to imagine how I would feel if I were that student and my paper had received those comments. I also want to say a few things about Sommers' first point to help students understand what they are doing well. It's important to offer praise to every writer. Students must know they are doing something well. Without this, students have no personal interest in revising or working more. Students must know what they are doing well. Without this, they won't know what to do when they do revise. They won't know what to take with them as a strength for their next paper. There are three main types of praise comments. The first is praise for what is there. This is the highest praise because you can show students, look at what you've done here. It's terrific. But there's another type of praise which is a little bit lower on the rungs. That is praise for the potential of what is there. It's not there, but it could be brought out more. The potential, you're getting to something really good here, but can you push a little bit more? Can you tweak it, whatever? The potential is there though? I can see it. I can see where it's headed, but is not there yet. Then the third is the praise for the possibility of what's there. Now, this is the weakest form of praise, but sometimes it's the best you can do. It suggests major improvement could come from major changes. I can see how in this paper you could make it work if you can do a, b, and c. That it's a good idea, or it's off to a good start, or it's clearly something that is important to you. Some praise in it. It should be genuine praise. We're not blowing smoke. But it's clear that the student has not gotten even to the point of potential yet to where they're getting close to what will succeed for them. But the possibility of that success is there and it's helpful for them or will be helpful for them to know what it is and to know where it is and to know it's there. The United States Department of Education has recently debunked three myths of responding. The first, conscientious teaching requires marking all grammar and language errors. There is a tendency to feel that we must mark all errors because if we don't, the ghost of our old 5th grade teacher will think we didn't realize that they were all errors. Myth 2, requiring two drafts of a paper doubles your work. But it makes more sense for you to invest your time and energy responding to the first draft and to make those comments truly facilitative. Respond to the final draft only briefly and let this be evaluative. You're not responding to both drafts if you have one draft and then a final paper, you're not responding to both of them equally. But the responses that you make to the first draft are the most valuable because students can actually do something about them. Then myth 3, more is better in terms of how much you respond to the problems in the paper. But students are often overwhelmed and paralyzed when they receive essays on which the instructor's comments trail into every margin and leave a depressing map of error and negative response. Even when response is positive, saying too much is often confusing. The quality of your comments is much more important than the quantity. What I always try to ask myself is what are the two or three most important things that this student could do that would make the greatest improvement in the paper where it stands right now. The Department of Education has suggestions on responding, and they say chose two or three elements of the essay to focus on giving highly specific constructive commentary rather than trying to cover all possible areas of concern. Comment on strengths as well as weaknesses. Make the majority of your comments at the end of the paper rather than in the margins because students pay more attention to these. Suggest how the student can do better next time, rather than merely identifying what they have done well or poorly in this particular assignment. These are all mimicking Sommers' comments as well. There are tips. If the students will be revising their writing, respond with questions and suggestions that will prompt revision. Margin comments are useful on first drafts. It's more useful to signal things and put them in the margin at the beginning on a first draft than it is on a final draft. Again, those margin comments are generally intended to help students improve, to improve a particular sentence, the sentence is a little tangled up here or correcting an error, something like that. They are more effective in early drafts. If you are commenting on the final draft or a final version of a writing assignment, consider responding with remarks that allow students to see strengths and weaknesses for future application. If you include a lot of questions on the final draft, students are likely to get frustrated, teachers might get frustrated too, but students are likely to get frustrated because they cannot respond to the questions. In a final draft, there really is nothing more that the student can do. To ask the student a question about, could you do this or even to voice it as a complaint that I wish you had done that is not necessarily all that helpful and can be frustrating. But if you can see that a student has demonstrated a particular strength in their paper, point that out and talk to them about maintaining that strength and building on that strength in the next paper. If you have noticed that there's a particular pattern that the student has that prevents the writing for being as strong as it could be, point that out to the student, and ask the student to be particularly aware of that in the next paper.