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The University Writing Center

Improving Our Responses to Student Writing

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Land Acknowledgment

We would like to acknowledge that we are meeting on Indigenous land. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge and pay our respects to the Carrizo & Comecrudo, Coahuiltecan, Caddo, Tonkawa, Comanche, Lipan Apache, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, Tigua Pueblo, and all the American Indian and Indigenous Peoples and communities who have been or have become a part of these lands and territories in Texas, here on Turtle Island.

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About the UWC and Our Services

One of the largest writing centers in the country
10,000 consultations annually
Provide 45-minute, one-on-one consultations for undergraduate and graduate students

Conduct presentations in 100+ classrooms each year
Facilitate writing groups and writing retreats for graduate students
Participate in workshops like this one

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Objectives

To share with you some of the challenges writers face when drafting and receiving feedback, keeping in mind that we are a neurodiverse community
To offer suggestions for improving the clarity and efficacy of your guidance and feedback
To help you consider different modalities of response to achieve the outcomes you want for your students
To give you a clearer picture of what students experience when they come to the writing center

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Adopting the Neurodiversity Paradigm

There are natural variations in human neurocognitive function. As a species, we are neurodiverse.
Some brain functions are more typically observed in society, and others less so (neurotypical/neurodivergent).
No one type of brain function is “right” or “best.” (Notions of value are social constructions).
The existence of social constructions about “right” or “best” causes power inequities in education and elsewhere.
Neurodiversity is also a source of creativity and empowerment.
Some types of neurodivergence: Autism, ADHD, Dyslexia, Dyspraxia, Tourette’s Syndrome, OCD

Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Autonomous Press, 2021.

Our task today is to consider how to frame our responses to student writing in ways that are accessible and effective for the wide array of learners on our campus. Assuming the neurodiversity paradigm helps us do that. Assume that there is a wide range of variation in human neural functioning, all of which are natural. Ideas about which ones are ”best” are socially constructed, and much of the way our education system works is tailored for the more common variations, which causes inequity for people whose brains function differently. (Think about timetables: How do we decide how much time students have for an assignment? A course? A degree? What do we expect students to ”already know” about how to complete our assignments?) By keeping neurodiversity in mind as we plan how we will respond to writing, we can push against some of those inequities.

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Problems Students Experience with Feedback

Nancy Summer’s “Beyond the Red Ink: Teachers’ Comments through Student Eyes,” a Bedford/St. Martins Production posted by Macmillan Learning

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Neurodivergent students may experience:

Slower processing speeds (time it takes to receive, understand, & respond to information)

Affect task initiation and time management

Fixations (on special interests, stressful topics, etc.)

Affect focus and ability to shift attention/prioritize tasks

Difficulty recognizing social cues & unwritten rules of communication

Affects interpretation and communication

Difficulty generalizing

Affects transferring skills to new situations

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Neurodivergent students & writing

Possible Challenge Areas

Task initiation
Time Management
Organization
Sequencing of Tasks
Prioritizing Tasks
Learning Transfer
Perfectionism

Steps to Writing a Paper

Interpreting the prompt

Brainstorming

Researching

Reading

Taking notes

Generating a thesis

Gathering data

Explaining how data supports a claim

Assembling ideas in a reader-friendly way

Seeking out library support

Getting feedback from peers and professor

Incorporating feedback/revising

Citing sources correctly

Proofreading

Submitting

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Neurodivergent students & writing

Possible Challenge Areas

Task initiation
Time Management
Organization
Sequencing of Tasks
Prioritizing Tasks
Learning Transfer
Perfectionism

Steps to Writing a Paper

Interpreting the prompt

Brainstorming

Researching

Reading

Taking notes

Generating a thesis

Gathering data

Explaining how data supports a claim

Assembling ideas in a reader-friendly way

Seeking out library support

Getting feedback from peers and professor

Incorporating feedback/revising

Citing sources correctly

Proofreading

Submitting

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Where Do Students Have Difficulty?

Getting Started (with draft or revision)
Interpreting our Comments
Prioritizing What’s Most Important

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Difficulty Getting Started (draft or revision)

Lots of reasons (“writer’s block,” anxiety, perfectionism)
Students with ADHD may experience task paralysis, even when they are aware of the task’s importance. (NB: It doesn’t mean they don’t care about the assignment.)
Students with autism particularly may have difficulty transferring a mastered skill to a new situation (eg., they may not realize that the sort of thesis they created for their first paper is the same kind you expect for their second.)

To minimize this challenge:

Minimize risk by putting the focus on process, not product (ungraded drafts, Learning Record, etc.)

Break down the research/writing process into multiple steps that build upon each other.

Remind students which skills will transfer from previous tasks to new ones.

Why?

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Being Unsure of How to Interpret …�

SHORTHAND. JUDGMENT STATEMENTS

awk, agr, ???! “This paragraph is too vague.”

ABSTRACT LANGUAGE�“Who is the audience for this paper?” (vs. “Who will be reading this paper?”)

OPEN QUESTIONS:�“What do you mean in this paragraph?” (vs. “I am confused here because...”)

SARCASM OR IRONY:

“It’s fine that you missed class. Of course we didn’t cover anything important.”

(vs. “It concerns me that you missed class on Friday.”)

�

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Being Unsure of What to Prioritize

To a student, all margin comments can seem to be equally important.

This can lead to a revision that prioritizes local issues (e.g.: spelling, grammar) rather than global ones (e.g.: thesis, idea development, support).

Another problem that may arise for students in interpreting instructor feedback is being unsure of what to prioritize. When an instructor just comments in the margins as they read the paper, the end result can be an abundance of marginal comments. Faced with such marginal comments, students will often conclude that all the comments are of equal importance. That can actually encourage students to prioritize local issues, such as sentence-level problems with spelling or grammar, rather than the global issues that tend to matter more to instructors, such as thesis an, support, and idea development. And it makes sense that students would start with the local fixes since these are often more straightforward and quicker to address. So we need to keep in mind when giving students feedback that we want to place emphasis on the most important revision moves.

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What You Can Do to Improve Students’ Experience with Feedback�

1. Ask them what they most want feedback on. Make it a requirement when they submit a draft.

2. Avoid shorthand and simple judgments (“AWK,” “good,” “bad,” etc.). Frame your assessment in terms of expectations for the genre, assignment, or audience.

Let them know: when they’ve met or what they need to do expectations to meet them

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What You Can Do to Improve Students’ Experience with Feedback

4. Minimize marginal comments.

Be judicious about what you respond to in the margin, and keep the comments short.
Write a final comment that summarizes where the paper is succeeding and what you suggest for revision. Prioritize global over local issues, and make sure students can see the difference in relative importance.
Use minimal marking for local issues.

Describe your experience reading the paper.
“I’m finding this easy to follow—your transitions are working.”
“I was confused here because….”
“I can’t tell how this connects to your thesis.”
Descriptions can help students understand how to think about their readers’ needs.

In lieu of judgments like “good” and “bad,” describe your experience of reading the paper, which can help students understand how their work is received by an audience. That might be what they need to transition their writing from the more writer-based prose typical to early drafts, in which the student is primarily writing to discover their own thoughts on a subject, to writing that takes the audience into account.

A lot of this description can happen in an end note, which gives you space to convey what you think should be the student’s priority in revising. For local issues, using minimal marking can be a way to make clear that the global issues should be the student’s priority. Minimal marking, as I’ll discuss in more detail in just a minute, is a system in which the instructor identifies patterns of errors instead of specific instances of that error. Basically, the instructor flags a couple of instances of the error and then uses the final comment to draw the student’s attention to the pattern.

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Assignment: Identify a literary figure who was based on a historical figure. Describe their similarities and differences and what these reveal about the literary work. Use scholarly sources to support your claims. 5-7 pages.

Paracelsus advised “not all things the physician must know are taught in the academies. Now and then he must turn to old women…to elderly country folk and many others who are frequently held in contempt. From them he will gather his knowledge since these people have more understanding of such things than all the high colleges.” (Debus 10) Further, in his own medical philosophy, Paracelsas “turned to Germanic folk medicine, which insisted that ‘like cures like” rather than the academic tradition of opposites curing. (Debus 31) Frankenstien, likewise, disdained the knowledge of the academies of his time and explains that he has difficulty “remov[ing] my prejudices against modern chemists.” (Shelley 51)

Both Frankenstein and Paracelsus were concerned primarily with medical practice and chemistry and not purely monetary gain. Paracelsus, like the Arabic alchemists, searched for a panacea or a universal elixir, but unlike the Arabs he didn’t dessert the search to seek for gold. (Wheelwright 94) Frankenstein, when as a youth he first discovers the natural sciences “entered with the greatest diligence into the search for the philosopher’s stone and the elixir of life; but the latter soon obtained my undivided attention. Wealth was an inferior object; but what glory would attend the discovery, if I could banish disease from the human frame.” (Shelley 45)

End notes: It looks like you found some great resources, but they dominate the paper. Add more analysis: Tell me why it is significant that Paracelsus and Frankenstein share these similarities, for example in accepting folk medicine as well as traditional medicine. Check your MLA format—periods belong at the end—and proofread carefully, especially names.

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Respond in Various Modalities

Canvas

Students are familiar with it
Provides a Comment box where you can conduct a conversation about the student’s paper

Have them to tell you what they want the most feedback on
Get them to describe their revision process across drafts
Ask questions about points that confused you as you read
Make use of the rubric function

Google Doc

Students are familiar with it
Simpler interface than Canvas
Allows for discussion in margins
Ask students to use track changes so you can see revisions easily
Assists in the revision process by encouraging students to work through a “living” document

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Modalities (continued)...

4. Conferences

Many students appreciate the face-to-face interaction
Ask questions that help you tailor your feedback:

“What is the thesis?”
“What part of the draft do you think needs the most work?”

Adapt to different needs (take notes on the session and give them to the student, be very specific about directions [“Open the word doc,” etc.])

5. Experiment with audio notes, video commentary, and other means of responding to students’ writing. You may wish to ask students which works best for them.

6. Encourage (but please don’t require) your students to visit the UWC.

If you are able to offer students writing conferences, that can be a way to approach feedback that allows for a more dynamic exchange. They also allow you to respond to the specific needs of neurodiverse students. If a student has difficulty taking notes, you can do it during the session and give them the notes after. Some students who are literal minded will need very specific instructions: “I’d like you to open the document on your computer so we can read my comments together.”) And some instructors use audio or video commentary to respond to student writing. For students, just hearing their paper read aloud can help them identify problems, so encouraging (but not requiring) students to come to the UWC, where we typically read student writing before having a conversation about it, can be a great resource. Please encourage them to visit us, but don’t require it for points. We’ve found that students who make the decision to work with us of their own accord engage the consulting process well. Making that decision for them prevents them from thinking about what they want help on–they’re just coming for the points. The result tends to be a session where the student doesn’t fully engage in the consulting process. Also, sometimes they may not be able to get an appointment.

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The UWC Philosophy

We tell every student that we are:

Non-directive & Non-evaluative

This approach allows us to be more emotionally sensitive to the students’ needs and helps to create a more relaxed environment.

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Feedback�

Directive & Evaluative

Grading
Proofreading
Editing

Non-directive/Non-evaluative

Asking questions
Diagnosing

(Middleground)

Modeling
Giving examples
Offering options

“This is a ‘D’ level thesis statement. Include X and Y in yours to make it better.”

“As a reader, I find your thesis confusing.

Will your instructor?”

“Here are models of different kinds of thesis statements. Which one jibes with

what your instructor wants?”

“According to this model, what could you change about your thesis statement

to make it meet those expectations?”

“What kind of thesis does your instructor want? Will it satisfy your instructor?”

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Questions?