Class Summary Of Sommers Carroll And Daiker

In pairs, write a three or four sentence summary for your assigned article. Be ready to share with the class. I will compile these into a short study guide for the class

(See below for summaries created by my spring 2013 students).

Donald Daiker – “Learning to Praise”
Teachers do not praise enough but need to because when professors/teachers give positive feedback to students, students tend to do better on their writing. More important, too much negative feedback can lead to writing apprehension. Highly apprehensive writers tend to avoid writing because they expect negative feedback; because they avoid writing, they become worse writers and then receive more negative feedback when they do write. A few positive feedback can go a long way to lower students apprehension. When giving feedback to students, give some things that you like about the paper but also note a weakness in the paper. Also teachers should understand each student is different so they shouldn’t hold the same standard to each one; you can praise in one student what you might discourage in another. Daiker calls this relative standards. put more effort into writing. It is important to use relative standards to judge each writer.

Nancy Sommers – “Responding to Student writing”
Professors do not always provide feedback that encourages students to write another draft. Sommers believes much teacher feedback leads to the student losing investment in their paper. The purpose of the paper is appropriated by the teacher, and instead of facing “the anxiety we all feel at reducing what looks like a finished draft into fragments of chaos” (156), students “correct” in response to the teacher comments, not making any other changes or thinking about their purpose in writing,. In order to truly critique a piece in a specific way you should use comments that actually question the substance of the writing and not just correction of grammar. And certainly instructors should correct grammar on the same draft they are addressing content changes; this confuses students because the message is contradictory and students do not know which error is most important (why edit a sentence that might fall out when the ideas are developed?). In addition, comments should be written in a clear and specific manner. Sommers claims that professors give generic, rubber-stamped responses rather than a personalized analysis of the message that the writer is trying to convey. Comments should be tailored to the specifics of the paper, should provide instruction, and should be tied to classroom lessons.

Lee Anne Carroll – Rehearsing new Roles
Students grow as writers through repeated practice and through experiencing new, challenging writing situations. Writers may be strong in certain subjects but when they are challenged with unfamiliar ways of writing, they may seem weak initially. In general, student writers improve throughout their studies, especially in their discipline (writers who begin as weaker writers show more improvement in their disciplinary writing than in other writing situations). This growth is not always evident to individual teachers in a single class. (our take away - Professors also have to be diverse in providing feedback because some students benefit from copious comments while others can might be overwhelm because they don’t take nothing out of it).
In freshmen composition, students learn generic writing skills; they doesn’t directly apply to a specific discipline.

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