Feedback about Feedback: How Do You Handle This in Sessions?

In my WRT 329 class, I worked on a project that dealt with feedback to students on their writing. While it primarily focused on feedback in a professor-student sense, I found some parallels to the kind of feedback that we give at the writing center, so I thought I’d share some insight.

The article itself is called “Across the Drafts” by Nancy Sommers. This particular article is an amendment of an earlier article where she claimed that the power of feedback rested primarily on the instructors. She urged writing instructors to stray away from the infamous marginal comments, which consist of broad, universal statements and suggestions such as “this is too vague” or “expand,” and she thought that instructors needed to utilize feedback as an “extension of the teacher’s voice” and an “extension of the teacher as reader” (p. 155).

However, in “Across the Drafts,” she adopts a new mantra of the student-professor relationship that serves more like a partnership. A student needs to be ready to receive and apply such feedback from his instructor, and likewise, the instructor needs to try to appeal more towards the writer and not necessarily the writing. I find that this relates to one of our mantras of helping the overall student as opposed to the individual paper.

Even more specifically, Jeff Sommers wrote an article about different kinds of audio feedback. I think this relates more to us at the writing center since we give live feedback while we read our clients’ texts, which is essentially what audio feedback does. Sommers concluded that there are three main types of feedback labeled retrospective, synchronous, and anticipatory. Retrospective comments link the teacher’s comment with previous interaction with the student, synchronous comments include responses that take the role and perspective of the reader, and anticipatory comments extend to offer insight and advice about future writing.

Personally, I find that I use Jeff Sommers’ comment categories every day, which, according to him, is a good thing. If I saw the client before, I’ll make a note of how they improved from last time or how it’s similar to something they already worked on. Similarly, I often take the role of the reader and audience and tell clients “as a reader, this is what I perceived and this is what I gathered,” and likewise, I ALWAYS try to offer them tips or strategies that they can utilize for both the paper at hand and also for their future writing assignments.

While reading these articles and other of similar stature, I really started to think about the entire feedback concept. It’s a really important thing, especially in the field of writing, and it’s something that occurs somewhat naturally and subconsciously but that can also be controlled and monitored.

So, how do YOU all conduct feedback and commentary? Do you find Jeff Sommers’ groupings to fit into what you do? Do you think there’s maybe a different category of feedback on which we could focus?